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STYLE AND ITS MEANING IN EARLY MEDIEVAL ART

Ernst Kitzinger
Interviewed by Richard Candida Smith

Art History Oral Documentation Project

Compiled under the auspices
of the
Getty Research Institute for the History of
Art and the Humanities

Copyright© 1997
The J. Paul Getty Trust

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RESTRICTIONS ON THIS INTERVIEW

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History of Art and the Humanities.

* * *

Frontispiece: Ernst Kitzinger, 1972. Photograph by Harvard University News Office,
courtesy of Ernst Kitzinger.

CONTENTS

Curriculum Vitae xvii

SESSION ONE: 18 FEBRUARY, 1995 (130 minutes)

TAPE I, SIDE ONE 1

Born and raised in Munich — Father's work as a lawyer — Family
Jewish, and liberal nationalist in political outlook — Mother's work in
child welfare activities — Rise of Nazism in Munich in 1920s —
Kitzinger physically attacked by Nazi youths when he was twelve —
Interest in art as a child — Visits to the Munich museums — Effect of
inflation on Kitzinger's family — Loyalty to the Weimar Republic and
its constitution — Older brother a "convinced materialist" — Brother
emigrated to South Africa, where he became a businessman — Sister's
welfare work in Munich and Palestine during the war — Parents
reluctance to leave Germany — Father interned in Dachau after
Kristallnacht — Successful effort to get parents out of Germany —
More on interest in art history as a child — Favorite works and
periods — Reading Georg Dehio — Visits to Berlin and its museums
— Gymnasium education — Training in Greek and Latin — Latin
training systematic but did not prepare students to read classical
literature — Drawing classes but no art history in Gymnasium.

TAPE I, SIDE TWO 16

Recalls making an art history presentation in one of his classes —
Survey of Gymnasium classes — More on independent readings in art
history — Heinrich Wolfflin — Kitzinger's early essay on three Diirer
engravings — Paul Frankl's influence — Decision in 1930 to attend the
University of Munich — Wilhelm Pinder's teaching style — "Shopping
around" in the German university system: absorbing ideas from
various disciplines — Art history education based on close stylistic
analysis and on comparison — Categories of analysis never relativized
or questioned — Pinder's understanding of iconology — Pinder's
approach to national styles — His attempts to define eternal German
characteristics in art and music — His interior conflict between pan-

IV

European cosmopolitanism and German nationalist ideals — Pinder's
theory of generational succession — The role of biology in Pinder's
work — Pinder's literary style — Ernst Michal ski's course in
connoisseurship — Ernst Buschor's lecturing style and his affinity for
biological analogies in art and culture — Carl Weickert — Philosophy
courses at Munich with Richard H. Honigswald — Reading Ernst
Cassirer — Heidegger's growing reputation — Kitzinger's decision to
go to Rome in the summer of 193 1 .

TAPE II, SIDE ONE 32

Kitzinger extends his knowledge of Italian art in Rome — Developing
an interest in the art and social world of the Spatantike — Parents'
suggestion that Kitzinger remain in Italy — Enrollment in the
University of Rome — Lectures by Pietro Toesca — The Bibliotheca
Hertziana as an intellectual center for Kitzinger — Discovering Alois
Riegl and his work on the Spatantike — Kunstwollen as a category of
analysis — Franz Wickhoff — Eugenie Strong's book on Roman
sculpture — Kitzinger's language skills — Meeting Harald Keller and
Werner Korte at the Hertziana — Absorbing methodology from
discussion with friends and from reading — Korte becomes a
convinced Nazi — No close relations with Italians — Friendship with
Hugo Buchthal — Ludwig Curtius and Armin von Gerkan at the
German Archaeological Institute — Discovering the importance of
Byzantium in understanding the transition from the Spatantike to the
early medieval in western Europe — A visit to Ravenna — Attending
the 1932 congress on Christian archaeology — Conviction that
Christian archaeology did not hold up as a discipline separate from the
history of art — Kitzinger's exposure to then contemporary trends in
German history and sociology — Importance of Max Dvorak in
conceptualizing an approach to the Spatantike — Reading Theodor
Mommsen and Ferdinand Gregorovius — Attempts to bridge the gap
between what he was observing in the art of the late empire in Rome
and what the histories of the period were telling him became the key to
Kitzinger's life work.

SESSION TWO: 23 FEBRUARY, 1995 (165 minutes)

TAPE III, SIDE ONE 46

Kitzinger's reading of late antique and early medieval art was entirely
visual and stylistic — A problem emerges that has occupied Kitzinger's
entire career: form has meaning and changes in style reveal something
about the forces at work in societies — More on Max Dvorak — Art
and Geistesgeschichte — Meeting Pinder in Rome — Pinder also
struck by the disjunction of art from political and social histories of the
period — Pinder's fascination with the "double shell" in architecture —
Discussions with Richard Krautheimer — Defining stylistic analysis

— Pinder and Buschor as stylistic theorists — Munich approach
contrasted to that of Adolph Goldschmidt — Seeing the form and
understanding its social meaning — More on the use of contrasting
principles in Wolfflin and the Munich approach to art history — More
on Kitzinger's plan to transfer to Hamburg to study with Erwin
Panofsky — Hugo Buchthal's thesis on the Paris Psalter — Kurt
Weitzmann and debates over the meaning of the tenth-century
renaissance — Buchthal's and Kitzinger's shared interests and
observations — The Nazi seizure of power — Kitzinger's decision to
speed up work, complete dissertation in one year, and leave Germany

— A changed atmosphere at the University of Munich — Pinder's
cooperative attitude toward Jewish students — Decision to write a
thesis on Roman wall paintings and mosaics of the seventh and eighth
centuries — Recently discovered Santa Maria Antiqua murals served
as primary source for attempts to make sense of the development of
forms — Comments on his later application of David Riesman's
antithesis of "inner-directed" and "other-directed" to analyze meaning
within style — Reading Myrtilla Avery's analysis of the Santa Maria
Antiqua murals.

TAPE III, SIDE TWO 61

Charles Rufus Morey — Debates over Byzantine influence in medieval
Rome and the relative importance of Asiatic and Alexandrian
influences on Byzantine art — Avery argued that Alexandrian artists
had emigrated to Rome after the Muslim conquest of Egypt — More
on the 1932 congress on Christian archaeology and the minimization
of the role of art in the field of Christian archaeology — Morey's

VI

SESSION TWO: 23 FEBRUARY, 1995 (165 minutes)

TAPE III, SIDE ONE 46

Kitzinger's reading of late antique and early medieval art was entirely
visual and stylistic — A problem emerges that has occupied Kitzinger's
entire career: form has meaning and changes in style reveal something
about the forces at work in societies — More on Max Dvorak — Art
and Geistesgeschichte — Meeting Pinder in Rome — Pinder also
struck by the disjunction of art from political and social histories of the
period — Pinder's fascination with the "double shell" in architecture —
Discussions with Richard Krautheimer — Defining stylistic analysis

— Pinder and Buschor as stylistic theorists — Munich approach
contrasted to that of Adolph Goldschmidt — Seeing the form and
understanding its social meaning — More on the use of contrasting
principles in Wolfflin and the Munich approach to art history — More
on Kitzinger's plan to transfer to Hamburg to study with Erwin
Panofsky — Hugo Buchthal's thesis on the Paris Psalter — Kurt
Weitzmann and debates over the meaning of the tenth-century
renaissance — Buchthal's and Kitzinger's shared interests and
observations — The Nazi seizure of power — Kitzinger's decision to
speed up work, complete dissertation in one year, and leave Germany

— A changed atmosphere at the University of Munich — Pinder's
cooperative attitude toward Jewish students — Decision to write a
thesis on Roman wall paintings and mosaics of the seventh and eighth
centuries — Recently discovered Santa Maria Antiqua murals served
as primary source for attempts to make sense of the development of
forms — Comments on his later application of David Riesman's
antithesis of "inner-directed" and "other-directed" to analyze meaning
within style — Reading Myrtilla Avery's analysis of the Santa Maria
Antiqua murals.

TAPE III, SIDE TWO 61

Charles Rufus Morey — Debates over Byzantine influence in medieval
Rome and the relative importance of Asiatic and Alexandrian
influences on Byzantine art — Avery argued that Alexandrian artists
had emigrated to Rome after the Muslim conquest of Egypt — More
on the 1932 congress on Christian archaeology and the minimization
of the role of art in the field of Christian archaeology — Morey's

VI

statistical method compared to Munich stylistic analysis — Kitzinger
returns to Munich in 1934 — Oral examinations with Pinder and
Buschor — A dismaying philosophy examination — Kitzinger leaves
Munich for Italy the day after passing his examinations — Difficulties
in getting his thesis published — Struggling to survive in Italy by
giving German lessons — Buchthal urges Kitzinger to go to England
— The difficulties German refugees had in entering Britain.

TAPE IV, SIDE ONE 77

Contacting the Warburg Institute in London — Befriending Fritz Saxl
and Gertrud Bing — Unsuccessful attempts to find a teaching position
through the Academic Assistance Council — Elizabeth Senior helps
Kitzinger get an unpaid position as a general assistant in the British
Museum — Working with T. D. Kendrick on documenting Anglo-
Saxon statuary — Finding continental connections that had previously
been unnoticed — Surviving by writing book reviews and taking on
miscellaneous editorial jobs — Scholarly advantages of indexing the
British Museum Quarterly — Kitzinger is sent to Egypt in 1937 to
study Coptic churches and art — Major discoveries in the Musee
Greco-Romain in Alexandria — Last part of trip spent traveling
through Palestine, Syria and Turkey — Importance of seeing the
imperial palace excavations and the Hagia Sophia mosaics in Istanbul
— Kitzinger's first publication in England: an article on Anglo-Saxon
vinescroll ornament — Paper on Coptic sculptures is published in
Archaeologia — Teaching at the Courtauld Institute —
Commissioned to write Early Medieval Art in the British Museum
(1940) — The book's success in the U.S. — Applying the Munich
binary method to the collections in the British Museum to create a
narrative of stylistic development from 300 to 1200 — Kitzinger's
preference for monographic subjects over narrative syntheses — His
study of Saint Cuthbert's coffin.

TAPE IV, SIDE TWO 93

More on Saint Cuthbert — Kitzinger's limited involvement with the
Warburg Institute — Lectures by T. S. Eliot and Edgar Wind —
Interaction of British and German traditions not very useful for
Kitzinger's scholarly goals — Warburgian approach of linking art to

vn

history and ideas struck Kitzinger more after he came to the U.S.
— Working with Buchthal on unpublished study of Byzantine
renaissances — Meeting Otto Kurz and Ernst Gombrich — Kitzinger
meets his future wife through Otto Demus — Tastes in contemporary
art, literature, and music — Remarks on the Stefan Georg
phenomenon and Georg' s influence on Gerhart Ladner and Ernst
Kantorowicz — Kitzinger's preference for Rilke — Lack of interest in
either Freudian or Jungian thought — Suspicious of most
psychological approaches to art — Association with Rudolf Arnheim.

SESSION THREE: 24 FEBRUARY, 1995 (180 minutes)

TAPE V, SIDE ONE 104

More on odd jobs at British Museum — Hired to review mounting and
labeling of objects for the Early Christian Room — The Sutton Hoo
excavations — Working on and publishing the silver objects from the
Sutton Hoo finds — British Museum prepares for war — Most
English refused to understand Hitler's intentions — More on Edgar
Wind and the Warburg — Life as an enemy alien during the first six
months of the war — Kitzinger interned after Dunkirk — Difficult
voyage on the troop ship Dtmera — Prison camp in Australia —
Warburg secures Kitzinger's release but he must wait nine months in
the camp — Learning Russian while in the prison camp — Offered a
fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks — Paul Sachs and the Robert Woods
Blisses — Released from prison to emigrate to the United States —
Arrival in New York five days after Pearl Harbor — Interned on Ellis
Island with Nazi and fascist supporters — Released after intervention
of Dumbarton Oaks — Comments on the splendor of the estate.

TAPE V, SIDE TWO 119

Morey and Henri Focillon at Dumbarton Oaks during its first year —
Wilhelm Koehler's goals for the fellowship program — The Archives
Project — A systematic gathering of information on excavated sites in
every Mediterranean country that had been part of the Byzantine
Empire — Koehler's goal was to get away from reliance on what he
called "roving objects" — The use of published reports — Kitzinger
begins to work on floor mosaics in order to see more clearly the

Vlll

connections of nonreligious and religious art — Use of the Library of
Congress — Conflict between art history and other disciplines at
Dumbarton Oaks — Most fellows did not feel that the Archives
Project was useful — Milton Anastos — Kitzinger recruited into the
Office of Strategic Services in 1943 — Assigned to work on compiling
handbook on Yugoslavia — Harvard Defense Group's lists of
monuments to be protected — OSS sent Kitzinger to London where
he was assigned to determine German capabilities for engaging in
guerrilla warfare against occupation forces — Applying his research
methods to intelligence work — Learning of the extermination camps

— A lecture on portraits of Christ at Duke University — Comments
on the atom bomb research at Dumbarton Oaks — Attitudes toward
the postwar environment — Witnessing the benefits of the Marshall
Plan in Sicily — Little faith in ability of scholarship to create a better
world.

TAPE VI, SIDE ONE 133

Morey's postwar skepticism concerning international scholarly
collaboration — Kitzinger's belief that economic conditions, not
spiritual values, drive politics — Marriage in 1944 to Susan Theobald

— Her art and her work with the Quakers during the war —
Kitzingers' three children and their careers — Dividing the year
between Oxford and Princeton — Spending a year in Sicily on a
Fulbright grant — Difficult living conditions in postwar Washington

— Kitzinger named Assistant Professor of Byzantine Art and
Archaeology at Dumbarton Oaks in 1 946 — Teaching stints at
Harvard during his years at Dumbarton Oaks — Adjustment to U.S.
intellectual life — More on Wilhelm Koehler and his influence —
More on research on mosaic floors — Continuing involvement of
Blisses in daily operations of the program — Koehler's successor,
George La Piana, minimized role of art in early Christian culture —
Appointment of A. M. Friend as director of studies — Friend's focus
on patronage and the influence of theological ideas on the shape and
form of monuments — Friend's primary goal was to recreate important
lost monuments of Byzantium, particularly the Church of the Holy
Apostles in Constantinople — Friend connected iconography to
important theologians — Kitzinger's resistance to Friend's primary
goals — Development of a research project on Byzantine mosaics —
Kitzinger assumed responsibility for the mosaics of Sicily.

IX

TAPE VI, SIDE TWO 148

Friend's deep knowledge of Byzantine intellectual and cultural history

— Personal and scholarly views of Friend — Comparing Friend with
Morey and Panofsky — Kurt Weitzmann's symbiotic relationship with
Friend — Scholarly debates with Panofsky — Otto von Simson —
Membership without rank on the Harvard faculty — Kitzinger teaches
at Harvard in 1947 — Impressions of the Harvard art history faculty

— Divisions between the older Americans and younger European-
influenced scholars — Jakob Rosenberg as conciliator — Reform of
the Harvard art history program in the 1950s — Lecturing at Yale and
Columbia — Memories of working with Rudolf Wittkower at the
Warburg in 1940 — Meyer Schapiro — Kitzinger's lectures at the
Institute of Fine Arts a stepping stone toward Byzantine Art in the
Making — On the interaction in art history between German and
American traditions — Learning how to write in English — The
procedures for reviewing and revising drafts of Early Medieval Art in
the British Museum — Abandoning daily use of the German language
after World War II began.

SESSION FOUR: 25 FEBRUARY, 1995 (220 minutes)

TAPE VII, SIDE ONE 165

More on Fulbright program — More on reconstruction of Saint
Cuthbert's coffin — Studying seventh-century Northumbrian liturgy
began Kitzinger's studies of the relationship of artistic form to
theology — Difficulties of developing proper analytic categories for
the particularly fragmented historical period from 300 to 800 — State
of scholarship on that period in 1945 — R. Komstedt's book on pre-
medieval painting in Ravenna — Kitzinger's work on the mosaics of
the Cappella Palatina in Palermo — Their relation to Byzantine art —
Previous scholarship did not see a distinction between the art of the
Norman kingdom of Sicily and that of Byzantium — Textual sources
used — Inventorying the monuments — Developing a vocabulary for
discussing the relationship of patrons and artists in this historical
period — Evidence gleaned from Sicilian theological writing —
Utilizing the published texts of Philagathos' homilies — Developing a
method based on examination of the placement of images in relation to

architectural functions — Shifting focus from artists to patrons as
authors of the monument's program — Utilizing art history to provide
new information on the social, political, and intellectual history of
Sicily — Relation of the Cappella Palatina essay to existing scholarship
and debates on the relation of Byzantine artistic forms to ideas of
monarchy — Andre Grabar and Andreas AlfOldi — Kantorowicz's
work on Frederick II and the Norman kingdom of Sicily.

TAPE VII, SIDE TWO 181

The adventus motif in monarchist art — More on what artistic style
can reveal about a society that we may not know already from other
sources — "The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm" (1954)

— Study originated in Nikolaus Pevsner asking Kitzinger and Richard
Krautheimer to write a volume on early Christian and Byzantine art for
the Pelican History of Art series — Utilizing the cult image as a focus
in discussing pictorial arts over a thirteen-hundred-year period —
More on Friend's grasp of Byzantine theology and its relation to the
functions of images — More on Andre Grabar's influence — Kitzinger
achieved the linkage of art, politics, and theology he had long sought
in this study of images before the period of iconoclasm — Friend's
critical response — Affinity with Gombrich's credo that form follows
function — Controversies over the dating of the catacomb paintings

— Debates with Weitzmann over the significance of Dura-Europos for
understanding early Christian art — "Byzantine Art in the Period
between Justinian and Iconoclasm" (1958) a continuation of
Kitzinger's work on the cult of images — Debates over the
Macedonian renaissance — The need to fill in the lack of knowledge
about Byzantine art in the three centuries following Justinian —
Reassessing the importance of Constantinople and metropolis/
provincial relations in Byzantium — Kitzinger challenges the theory of
the provincial origins of Byzantine abstraction — Taking a more
complex view of Hellenistic/abstract dichotomies — Kitzinger's work
on the cult of images helps to resolve early questions concerning the
iconographic messages contained in style — Returning to Germany for
the first time in 1958.

XI

TAPE VIII, SIDE ONE 195

Munich in 1958 — Abandoning work on the Pelican book — The
Mosaics ofMonreale (1960) — On the relation of Monreale to the
Cappella Palatina — Debates on the relation of mosaics to illuminated
manuscripts — Demus's work on the mosaics of Norman Sicily —
Monreale and the late Comnenian style — Kitzinger's hypothesis that
artists not interested in programmatic message of monuments they
created — Disagreement with Eve Borsook's approach to the
Monreale mosaics — Predominance of aesthetics over message in
Monreale — Domenico Gravina's book on Monreale — On the need
to integrate studies of architecture and its decoration — Kitzinger's
suggestion that there was a Greek mastermind behind the architecture
and decoration ofMonreale — Aristotile Fioravanti — More on
Gravina's book and its relationship to Kitzinger's publication on
Monreale — The extensive use of color photography in Kitzinger's
Monreale book — Success ofMonreale book in Italy.

TAPE VIII, SIDE TWO 210

Style does not play an iconographic role at Monreale — Jan
Bialostocki's work on stylistic modes — "Some Reflections on
Portraiture in Byzantine Art" (1963) — Intended as a corrective to
earlier work on abstract style — Kitzinger arguing that some
Byzantine artists worked in both Hellenistic and abstract styles to
make different statements — Adolphe-Napoleon Didron's studies of
the Painter's Manual — Kitzinger's hypotheses on the prototype as a
nonlinguistic, nonintellectual mode of transmitting visual style from
generation to generation — The meaning of the term "humanistic" in
the post-Iconoclasm period — "On the Interpretation of Stylistic
Changes in Late Antique Art" (1967) — Written while a fellow at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton — Session on the
interpretation of style at a College Art Association annual meeting —
Use of David Riesman's categories of "inner-directed" and "other-
directed" to explain stylistic transformations in late Roman art —
George Kubler's The Shape of Time a critical influence upon
Kitzinger's rethinking of stylistic development — Studies of patronage
and stylistic change — Conceptualizing artists' variations of ornament
as a privileged indicator of more general cultural shifts.

xn

TAPE IX, SIDE ONE 226

More on ornament as a marker of cultural change — Relation of this
hypothesis to Kitzinger's longstanding question of exploring the
meaning of artistic form — Kitzinger's use of the term Zeitgeist —
Ideas on evolutionary tendencies in art — George Kubler's interest in
developing a theory of change in art that paralleled Darwin's theory of
natural selection — Ornament provides a non-tautological point for
examining the relation of art to social context — Ornament as a
psychological marker — Buchthal's attempts to identify specific
Byzantine ateliers — "The Role of Miniature Painting in Mural
Decoration" (1975) — Debate with Weitzmann over the use of motif
books in mural decoration — Differing opinions over the role of
iconography in the Wolfenbiittel book — Limitations of trying to
identify ateliers through motifs rather than through style and technique
— Use of the term "artisan" rather than "artist" in studies of Byzantine
art — Evidence of artists' social position and education in Byzantine
society.

SESSION FIVE: 31 MAY, 1995 (120 minutes)

TAPE X, SIDE ONE 237

Byzantine Art in the Making (1976) — Developed during several
years of courses at Harvard and consolidated as Slade Lectures at
Cambridge University — Changes in art history since mid-1970s have
made this book "almost prehistoric" — "Stylistic development" no
longer an interest for most art historians — Book is nonetheless the
standard text for the subject in the U.S. — Its popularity in Italy
— The book's relation to current reinterpretations of meaning of
Byzantine art and its expression in style — Defining the role of
creative individuals who lived under extremely adverse social
conditions — Refusal of art historians to see the elevation of form
over content as a force in the art of the past — Deconstruction as a
challenge to the art history of Kitzinger's generation — Art historians
no longer taught how to see or how to do stylistic analysis — Reviews
of Byzantine Art in the Making — Kitzinger's graduate students at
Harvard in the 1970s — His interest in reception theory — On his
recruitment to Harvard in 1967 — Student unrest of 1968-1971 —

Xlll

Little feminism in Harvard art history program in 1970s — Kitzinger's
article on the Cleveland marbles — Determining that early Christian
statues of Jonah were not forgeries — Redating work to the third
century — Kitzinger's sole exercise in connoisseurship — William
Wixom's publication on the Cleveland marbles — Revolutionary
effects of Cleveland statues on understanding of early Christian art —
Tomb robbing in Turkey and the morality of museum acquisitions —
Silver treasure illegally acquired by Dumbarton Oaks — Ethics of
scholarly publication of stolen treasures.

TAPE X, SIDE TWO 252

Participation as final speaker summarizing the Rennes conference on
artists, artisans, and the Middle Ages — Kitzinger's criticism of art
historians who view art as a "handmaiden of social history" —
Examining and defining the "beautiful" should remain a key task of art
history — Kitzinger's paper at Spoleto addressed the limitations of
patron-centered studies of Byzantine art — Ongoing work on
publishing 1950s black-and-white photographs of all Byzantine-
influenced mosaics in Sicily — Funding, publication schedule, and
preparation of a multivolume corpus — The problem of distinguishing
original work from restorations — An anachronistic project: a 1950s
concept realized in the 1990s — Reviews and reactions to the work —
"Scientific" versus "critical" art history — Ideas have overcome the
need for documentation of monuments.

TAPE XI, SIDE ONE 265

Difficulties in marketing and distributing the volumes on Sicilian
mosaics — Questions that shaped the original photography in the
1950s — "Interface and Icons: Form and Function in Early Insular
Art" (1991) — Returning to "dark ages" British art — Arguing for the
connection of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic art to parallel continental
developments — Kitzinger's arguments had little effect on British
archaeologists — Theoretical speculation and antiquarian taxonomy as
the two persistent dangers to scientific art history — Present trends to
minimize the importance of the object undermine the discipline's
epistemological base — Future publication plans.

xiv

SESSION SIX: 1 JUNE, 1995 (135 minutes)

TAPE XII, SIDE ONE 275

More on recruitment to Harvard in 1967 — Choice between the
Institute for Advanced Study and Harvard — Kitzinger's unusual
career path — Courses and seminars at Harvard — Restrictions of the
Grau stein plan at Harvard — Faculty collegiality at Harvard — Use of
objects from Dumbarton Oaks in classes — Relations with Fogg Art
Museum — Harvard faculty clubs — Topics and structure of graduate
seminars — Language requirements for Kitzinger's students — More
on student unrest of late 1960s — Post '68 art history at Harvard still
reflected traditional approaches — Accepting the Pour le Merite
offered by the Federal Republic of Germany — Decision to retire from
Harvard — Accomplishments of Kitzinger's students.

TAPE XII, SIDE TWO 289

Kitzinger's concept of Dumbarton Oaks and its purpose — "Built in
problems" associated with research institutes in the U. S. — European
practice of allowing students to mature as scholars before launching
into teaching careers — Geographical separation from Harvard a
problem at Dumbarton Oaks — Ambiguities of wording in Blisses'
wills and deeds of gift contribute to confusion of purpose — More on
Focillon and Morey as first senior scholars at Dumbarton Oaks —
More on Koehler's establishment of a research program — A. M.
Friend persuades Harvard to create a permanent faculty for
Dumbarton Oaks — Problems associated with faculty positions —
Too much of faculty's time spent on routine library and publications
work — Kitzinger's plan to expand the publications program to
include large projects too difficult for individual scholars to do alone
— John Thacher's successful administrative philosophy: allowing
scholars to do their work — Difficulties in coordinating the non-
Byzantine components within Dumbarton Oaks: the Garden Library
and the pre-Columbian collection — Establishment of the Center for
Byzantine Studies.

TAPE XIII, SIDE ONE 301

William Tyler's attempts to equalize the three branches of Dumbarton

xv

Oaks — A diminished role for the director of studies — Giles
Constable appointed as the single scholar/director running all three
branches of Dumbarton Oaks — Kitzinger's resignation — More on
controversial silver treasure acquired by Dumbarton Oaks —
Undertaking an architectural survey of Hagia Sophia — Ever
diminishing role of art within the Dumbarton Oaks programs — Earlier
collaborations between art historians, philologists, and historians -
Attempts by director Angeliki E. Laiou to revive art-historical interests
at Dumbarton Oaks — More on the goals of the publications program
— Kitzinger's regrets about spending too much time on scholarly
administration — Unable to do much to influence direction of
Dumbarton Oaks after his resignation — More on Kitzinger's
productive years at Dumbarton Oaks preceding his appointment as
director of studies — How he divided his workweek -- Summarizing
the scholarly aims of his research.

Appendix 315

Index 335

Richard Candida Smith, Assistant Professor of History at the
University of Michigan, interviewed Ernst Kitzinger at his home in
Oxford, England. A total of 1 5.85 hours were recorded. The
transcript was edited by Katherine P. Smith.

xvi

CURRICULUM VITAE

Ernst Kitzinger

Born December 27, 1912, Munich, Germany.

Married Margaret Susan Theobald 1944; three children.

Education:

Universities of Munich and Rome; Ph.D. Munich 1934.

Professional Career:

1935-1940 Assistant in the British Museum, London

1941-1967 Dumbarton Oaks (Trustees for Harvard University), Washington DC.

1941-1943 Junior Fellow

1945-1946 Fellow

1946-1951 Assistant Professor of Byzantine Art & Archaeology

1951-1956 Associate Professor

1955-1966 Director of Studies

1956-1967 Professor of Byzantine Art & Archaeology
1967-1979 Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, Harvard University
1979- Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, Emeritus

1943-1945 Office of Strategic Services, Washington and London (successively

Assistant Research Analyst and Research Analyst)
1950-1951 Fulbright Scholar in Sicily, working on the mosaics of the Norman

period.
1953-1954 Guggenheim Fellow, traveling in Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey
1966-1967 Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
1974-1975 Slade Professor of Fine Art, University of Cambridge
1980, 1982 Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
1989 Visiting Distinguished Professor, University of Washington, Seattle

Memberships and Honors:

German Archaeological Institute, Member (1953)
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow (1961)
American Philosophical Society, Member (1967)
Swarthmore College, D. Litt. (1969)

xvn

National Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts, Palermo, Corresponding Member

(1969)
British Academy, Corresponding Fellow (1969)
Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Corresponding Member (1970)
Medieval Academy of America, Fellow ( 1 97 1 )
Society of Antiquaries of London, Hon. Fellow (1975)
Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, Corresponding Member (1980)
Order Pour le Merite fur Wissenschaften und Kunste, Member (1982)
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Corresponding Member (1983)
University of Warwick, D. Litt. (1989)

Oesterreichisches Ehrenzeichen fur Wissenschaft und Kunst (1990)
University of Rome "La Sapienza", D. Litt. (1992

Publications (Partial)

Romische Malerei vom Begirm des 7. bis zur Mitte des 8. Jahrhimderts. Munich,
1936 (dissertation).

"Anglo-Saxon Vinescroll Ornament." Antiquity 10 (1936): 67-71.

"Notes on Early Coptic Sculpture." Archaeologia 87 (1938): 181-215.

"The Sutton Hoo Finds: The Silver." British Museum Quarterly 13 (1939):1 18-126.

"The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial: The Silver." Antiquity 14 (1940): 40-63.

Early Medieval Art in the British Museum. London: British Museum, 1940; second
edition 1955; Bloomington Indiana: Midland Books, Indiana University Press, 1964;
third edition 1983; German edition: Kleine Geschichte der fruhmittelalterlichen
Kunst, Cologne, 1987.

Portraits of Christ. Harmondsworth: The King Penguin Books, with Elizabeth
Senior, 1940.

"The Horse and Lion Tapestry at Dumbarton Oaks: A Study in Coptic and Sassanian
Textile Design." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 3 (1946): 1-72.

"A Survey of the Early Christian Town of Stobi." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 3 (1946):
81-161

xvm

"The Mosaics of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo: An Essay on the Choice and
Arrangement of Subjects." Art Bulletin 31 (1949): 269-292.

The Coffin of Saint Cuthbert. Oxford: University Press, 1950.

"Mosaic Pavements in the Greek East and the Question of a 'Renaissance' under
Justinian." Actes du \T Congres International d'Etudes Byzantines, Paris, 27
juiltet-2 aout 1948, 2 (Paris, 1951): 209-223.

"Studies on Late Antique and Early Byzantine Floor Mosaics: I. Mosaics at
Nikopolis. " Dumbarton Oaks Papers 6 (1951): 81-122.

"The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8
(1954): 83-150. Italian translation: // cu/to delle immagini, Florence, 1992.

"On Some Icons of the Seventh Century." In Late Classical and Mediaeval Studies
in Honor of Albert Mathias Friend, Jr., ed. K. Weitzmann et al, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1955, 132-150.

"The Coffin-Reliquary." In The Relics of Saint Cuthbert, ed. C. F. Battiscombe,
Oxford: University Press, 1956, 202-304.

"Byzantine Art in the Period between Justinian and Iconoclasm." Berichte zum XI.
Internationalen Byzantinisten-Kongress, Miinchen, 1958 (Munich, 1958), IV/1,
1-50; Japanese translation by S. Tsuji, Tokyo, 1971; Italian translation, Florence,
1992 (with II culto delle immagini).

"A Marble Relief of the Theodosian Period." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 14 (1960):

17^12.

The Mosaics ofMonreale. Palermo: S..F. Flaccovio Editore, 1960; also in Italian: I
Mosaici di Monreale, tr. F. Bonajuto; republished, with a new preface, in 1991 (in
Italian only).

"The Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies." Jahrbiicher fur Geschichte
Osteuropas, N.F., 10, Heft 3 (1962): 485-491; reprinted with minor changes in
Harvard Library Bulletin 19(1971): 28-32.

"Some Reflections on Portraiture in Byzantine Art." Zbornik radova, 8/1 = Recueil
des travaux de I'Institut d' Etudes byzantines, No. VIII = Melanges G. Ostrogorsky, I

xix

(Belgrade, 1963): 185-193.

"The Hellenistic Heritage in Byzantine Art." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963):
95-1 15. Reprinted in abridged form in Readings in Art History (H. Spencer, ed.),
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969, 1, 167-188.

Israeli Mosaics of the Byzantine Period. UNESCO. New York: The New American
Library, Inc., 1965. Also published in Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

"Stylistic Developments in Pavement Mosaics in the Greek East from the Age of
Constantine to the Age of Justinian." LaMosaique Greco-Romaine, Colloques
Internationaux du Centre National de La Recherche Scientifique, Paris, 29 aout-3
septembre, 1963. Paris, 1965, 341-352.

"Norman Sicily as a Source of Byzantine Influence on Western Art in the Twelfth
Century." Byzantine Art — An European Art, lectures given on the occasion of the 9th
Exhibition of the Council of Europe, Athens, 1966, 123-147.

"The Byzantine Contribution to Western Art of the Twelfth and Thirteenth
Centuries," Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 20 (1966): 25-47, 265-266.

"On the Interpretation of Stylistic Changes in Late Antique Art." Buckne 11 Review
15/3 (December 1967): 1-10.

"The Gregorian Reform and the Visual Arts: A Problem of Method." Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 22 (1972): 87-102.

"The First Mosaic Decoration of Salerno Cathedral." Jahrbuch der Osterreichischen
Byzantinistik 21 (1972) = Festschrift fur Otto Demus zum 70. Geburtstag, 149-162.

"World Map and Fortune's Wheel: A Medieval Mosaic Floor in Turin."
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117/5 (1973): 343-373.

"Observations on the Samson Floor at Mopsuestia." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 27
(1973): 133-144.

"A Pair of Silver Book Covers in the Sion Treasure." In Gatherings in Honor of
Dorothy E. Minor, eds. U. McCracken, L. and R. Randall. Baltimore: Walters Art
Gallery, 1974,3-17.

xx

"A Fourth Century Mosaic Floor in Pisidian Antioch." Mansel'e Armagan:
Melanges Manse I [Arif Mufid Mansel], Turk Tarih Kurumu Yayinlari Dizi VH-Sa.
60, Ankara, 1974, Vol. I, 385-395.

"Christus und die /wolf Apostel." Das Einhardkreuz, Vortrage und Studien der
Munsteraner Diskussion zum arcus Einhardi, ed. Karl Hauck, Abhandlungen der
Akademie der Wissenschaften in Gottingen, Philologische-Historische Klasse, 3,
Folge, Nr. 87, Gottingen, 1974, 82-92.

"The Role of Miniature Painting in Mural Decoration." In The Place of Book
Illumination in Byzantine Art, ed. K. Weitzmann. Princeton: Princeton University
Art Museum, 1975, 99-142.

The Art of Byzantium and the Medieval West: Selected Studies, ed. W.E. Kleinbauer,
Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1976.

Byzantine Art in the Making: Main Lines of Stylistic Development in Mediterranean
Art — 3rd-7th Century. London: Faber & Faber; Cambridge Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1977; German edition: Byzantische Kunst im Werden, Cologne,
1984; Italian edition: L'arte bizantina, Milan, 1989.

"The Cleveland Marbles." Atti del IX Congresso internazionale di archeologia
cristiana; Roma 21 27 Settembre 1975. Rome, 1978, Vol. I, 653-675; reprinted in
Studies in Early Christianity, 18 (PC. Finney, ed.), New York and London 1993.

"A Virgin's Face: Antiquarianism in Twelfth-Century Art." Art Bulletin 62 (1980):
6-19.

"Christian Imagery: Growth and Impact." Age of Spirituality — A Symposium, ed. K.
Weitzmann, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Princeton University Press, 1980,
141-163.

"The Hellenistic Heritage in Byzantine Art Reconsidered." Jahrbuch der
Oesterreichischen Byzantiniatik 31 (1981): 657-675.

"The Arts as Aspects of a Renaissance: Rome and Italy." In Renaissance and
Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. R. L. Benson and G. Constable, Cambridge,
Mass., 1982, 637-670.

"The Descent of the Dove: Observations on the Mosaic of the Annunciation in the

xxi

Cappella Palatina in Palermo." Byzanz imd der Westen, Vienna, 1984, 99-1 15.

"The Portraits of the Evangelists in the Cappella Palatina in Palermo," Studien zur
mittelalterlichen Kunst 800-1250: Festschrift fur Florentine Miitherich, Munich,
1985, 181-192.

"Enas naos tou 12ou aiona aphieromenos ste theotoko: He Panagia tou nauarchou sto
Palermo," Deltion tes Christianities Archaiologikes Hetaireias, ser. 4, 12, 1984
(published 1986), 167-194; republished in Italian in BCA Sicilia 6-8 (1985-1987):
11-31.

"Two Mosaic Ateliers in Palermo in the 1 140s." Artistes, Artisans et Production
Artistique auMoyenAge, ed. X Barral i Altet, I, Paris, 1986, 277-294.

"Reflections on the Feast Cycle in Byzantine Art." Cahiers Archeo/ogiques 36
(1988)51-73.

"Mosaic Decoration in Sicily under Roger II and the Classical Byzantine System of
Church Decoration. " In Italian Church Decoration of the Middle Ages and the
Early Renaissance, ed. W. Tronzo, Bologna, 1989, 147-165.

"Closing Remarks," Artistes, Artisans et Production Artistique au Moyen Age, ed. X
Barral i Altet, I, Paris, 1990, 647-650.

The Mosaics of St. Mary's of the Admiral in Palermo (Dumbarton Oaks Studies 27),
Washington DC, 1990; / mosaici di Santa Maria dellAmmiraglio a Palermo
(Instituto Siciliano di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici, Monumenti 3). Palermo 1990.

"Artistic Patronage in Early Byzantium." Settimane di studio del Centro italiano
di studi sull'alto medioevo 39 (1992): 33-55.

/ mosaici del periodo normanno in Sicilia, Fasc.I: La Cappella Palatina di Palermo:
I mosaici del presbiterio. Palermo 1992.

"Bizantina Arte." Enciclopedia dell' arte medievale, III, Rome 1992, 517-534.

"Interlace and Icons: Form and Function in Early Insular Art," The Age of Migrating
Ideas — Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Insular Art, ed. R.
Michael Spearman and John Higgitt, Edinburgh 1993, 3-15.

xxn

/ mosaici del periodo normanno in Sici/ia, Fasc. II: La Cappella Palatina di
Palermo: I mosaici delle novate. Palermo 1993.

/ mosaici del periodo normanno in Sicilia, Fasc. Ill: II Duomo di Monreale: I
mosaici dell'abside, della solea e delle cappelle laterali. Palermo 1994.

"Kurt Weitzmann (7 March 1904-7 June 1993)", Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, vol. 139, no. 2, June 1995, pp. 203-209.

/ mosaici del periodo normanno in Sicilia, Fasc. IV: // Duomo di Monreale: I
mosaici del transetto, Palermo 1995.

"The Mandylion at Monreale." Mi/ion 3 (1995): 575-602.

xxm

SESSION ONE: 18 FEBRUARY, 1995

[Tape I, Side One]

SMITH: The first question is always the easiest and simplest. When and where were

you born?

KITZINGER: December 27, 1912, in Munich.

SMITH: Could you tell me a little bit about your parents, both your father and your

mother?

KITZINGER: My father [Wilhelm Kitzinger] was a lawyer, and he came from Furth,

which is in northern Bavaria. My mother [Elisabeth Kitzinger, nee Merzbacher] was

born and raised in Munich. They were both Jewish. My mother, from a very early

period, became involved in social work, particularly for Jewish children. That was as

a result of the pogroms that had occurred in Russia at the end of the nineteenth

century; a lot of refugee families came to Germany. So my mother, together with her

sister and a friend, started a kindergarten in 1904, which was a rather extraordinary

thing to do for good, middle-class young ladies. How she persuaded my grandmother

to have this thing in their house, I have never understood. It was a large apartment

which still exists, just opposite the Royal Palace in Munich. Anyway, from this very

modest beginning it developed into a major operation over the years, as a result of the

First World War and the depression that followed. So my mother was a leading

figure in the social services of the Jewish community in Munich, particularly in regard

1

to child welfare.

SMITH: What kind of law did your father do?

KITZINGER: He was what would be called in this country a solicitor. For instance,

he was officially appointed to a big bankruptcy case that was a result of the economic

conditions in Germany in the twenties. That's a case that I remember clearly, but he

was a very reticent person and he didn't talk much about his work.

SMITH: Did your family consider itself German?

KITZINGER: Oh yes, absolutely. But there were all shades within the Jewish

population of Germany. There were a lot of people of my father's generation who

had fought in the First World War, who had a veteran's mentality, and at the other

extreme you had the Zionists, who were really not interested in Germany. My parents

and the whole family belonged to the moderate, middle ground.

SMITH: Were they liberals, politically?

KITZINGER: Yes, they were liberals.

SMITH: Bavaria is a very Catholic part of Germany. Did you grow up having a

sense of Catholicism as a culture?

KITZINGER: Oh yes, very much so, and having developed this interest in art at an

early period, of course the church art of Bavaria was of great interest to me. I always

had sympathy for the Catholic church in that sense. But all this was overshadowed

from a very early period by the rise of Nazism. I had my earliest experiences of this at

the age often, eleven.

SMITH: Yes, the putsch.

KITZINGER: The Hitler putsch. I still remember the teachers at the Gymnasium,

you could tell very easily that some of them were ardent nationalists, and others were

quite liberal, so you found yourself faced with this conflict.

SMITH: When did you become aware of anti-Semitism?

KITZINGER: Certainly during those early Hitler years, in 1922, '23. They had these

big rallies, so one would see these big red posters all over the town saying, "Juden ist

der Zutritt verboten" — that was a standard thing. So you couldn't help being aware

of this. Particularly with my mother being involved officially in Jewish activities,

certainly I was very conscious of [anti-Semitism].

SMITH: What about personally, in terms of the school. Were any of your teachers

or fellow students offensive?

KITZINGER: I remember once being physically attacked in the street by unknown

youngsters. I remember that must have been in the second grade in the Gymnasium,

which meant I was twelve. There was some incident which I don't remember, but the

classroom teacher came to my rescue. He was an upright man and . . . well, that's the

kind of thing that happened. One thing I should say incidentally here, my memory

isn't what it was, and certain things I just don't remember.

SMITH: That's okay. What about the role of culture in your family? Was your

family interested in the arts?

KITZINGER: Oh yes. Particularly in the winter months, it was standard procedure
that on Sunday morning the family would go to a museum. This could be any
museum — the science museum, which had just been started in Munich and which
became a very famous institution, or the Alte Pinakothek, or the Staatsgalerie — but
certainly art museums dominated over the others. This was very important in my
development, being taken to see original paintings at a very early age. But why this
should have had more of an influence on me than the science museum, that I find hard
to answer.

Aside from these museum visits, my mother belonged to an informal group
that met once every two weeks or so in one of the ladies' houses, to learn about the
history of art. There was a woman who actually lived in the same apartment house as
we did, who had been a student of [Heinrich] Wolfflin's. She taught this group of
ladies the history of art, very much in Wolfflinian terms, and that certainly rubbed off
on me in some ways. So the answer to your question about culture and art in the
family is, yes, it was there. There were decent pictures in the house, some of which
are still here with me in Oxford, but in the post-World War I economic situation there
was no question of people like my parents being collectors.
SMITH: Were they interested in modern art? Were you aware of Die Briicke?
KITZINGER: Not at that point, no. I was barely aware, I think, even of the

Tannhauser Gallery in Munich. Munich of course was very much a backwater; in
terms of twenties and early thirties German culture, it was very conservative. The
Tannhauser was one gallery [that did have modern paintings], and they ended up in
the Guggenheim Museum in New York. My parents did not oppose modern art, but
they weren't interested in it — we went to the Pinakothek. It went as far as van Gogh.
I remember an uncle who got remarried in the twenties, and in their house they had a
very good reproduction of the van Gogh Sunflowers. That was rather progressive
from the point of view of the kind of art that was visible on the walls of most people's
houses at the time.

SMITH: Do you know what the effects of the inflation were on your family? You
would have been about nine or ten years old at the time.

KITZINGER: Yes, well, of course I remember inflation itself very well — these
packets of banknotes that you took just to buy some groceries, all crisp and new. I
still think I was very happy with this because they were so fresh from the printers,
[laughter] But of course lots of middle-class families like ours were very badly hit by
the inflation. One advantage that we had over many people was that my father had a
brother in this country, in England, who had done extremely well in South African
mining. He had died very prematurely, in 1921 or '22, and my father and his siblings
inherited a fair amount of money from him, but it came through only after the inflation
was over. It kind of made up for the loss of capital that all these families suffered.

As a result my parents and my father's brother and sister-in-law together were
able to buy a very simple house in the country, about twenty miles from Munich, on
the Starnbergersee. Having acquired this house in the middle of nature at a very
crucial age in my life — I was thirteen or so — meant an enormous amount. In the
years following, from 1925 to 1933, 1 considered this my real home. We spent all
weekends there and most summers. Perhaps as a result of this we didn't travel as
much as other families did, although we did a certain amount of that too. But if I
think of my roots, I think of that house. And then of course it was lost; it was in
effect confiscated. In a way, we were not hit as heavily as some people were.
SMITH: I presume that inheritance was in sterling?

KITZINGER: Yes, but then of course in the crisis years, 1929-30, one was supposed
to be patriotic and bring all that money into Germany. My father maintained a link
with the brokerage firm in London that was in charge of [my uncle's] estate. This did
become important when I left Germany in '34, by which time you couldn't take any
money out of the country. We made an application to the appropriate financial office
in Munich for me to be allowed to draw on this sterling money, which was a few
hundred pounds. Of course at that time it was worth more than a few hundred
pounds are now; it meant being able to live for a year, and this was extremely
important if you had to live without any income at all.

I always remember the interview at this financial office, to which I went with

my father. My father, who was a very quiet, reticent person, not given to histrionics,
said to this man, "Surely one can't be expected to send one's child into misery!" Of
course you never knew whom you were talking to; the man could have been a Nazi,
or he could have been someone who was secretly on one's own side. Anyway, we did
get permission for me to use this money in sterling, and that was a great help.
SMITH: I'd like to ask you a little bit about your attitudes as you were moving into
adolescence and a little older, entering college, towards the Weimar Republic.
Hannah Arendt, in her recollections, noted that young people who were intellectual
dismissed politics as banal and believed that the Weimar Republic was corrupt.
KITZINGER: Oh no, we believed firmly in the Weimar Republic; it was supposedly
the guarantee of liberalism, of democratic institutions. The anniversary of the
promulgation of the Weimar Constitution was in August, and this happened to be
school holidays, but it was incumbent on school administrations to distribute a copy
of the constitution to every student. I still remember bringing home this little
brochure, the text of the Weimar Constitution. I must have been thirteen or fourteen.
Half the students who were given this I saw tearing it up as they left the school
building, but not us, we believed in Weimar. Heavens, yes.
SMITH: Could you tell me a little bit about your siblings? You had a brother
[Richard], I know.
KITZINGER: I had a brother and a sister [Gretel]. My brother was two years older

than I, and a convinced materialist. That is to say, he was convinced that what really
mattered was that people had enough to eat. Oddly enough, he never became a
communist, which is what happened to a lot of people in my generation who had that
kind of approach. Our cousins in Berlin, two young men of the same age, both
became ardent communists. My brother never did, but he was totally convinced that
all those things that I was interested in, art and literature and so on, didn't mean
anything as long as you didn't have enough to eat. Quite in line with this, his subject
at the university was economics. He did belong to a political club, but a very civilized
one, in which economic matters were discussed.

In my development, the opposition to this older but diametrically opposed
brother was very important. The sequel to this was that as a result of our family
connections with South Africa, he emigrated there in 1933, became involved in
mining, and became an ardent capitalist, [laughter] He remained one all his life and
died a few years ago.
SMITH. In South Africa?

KITZINGER: No. He married a South African girl and they decided in the fifties
that South Africa was not a country in which to bring up one's children, and they
came to London. He lived the whole later part of his life in London, and died there.
SMITH: What did your sister do?
KITZINGER: She followed in my mother's footsteps in being a social worker. She

8

also studied economics, but very much with a view to welfare.

SMITH: She went to university then as well?

KITZINGER: Yes, she got a degree, also in economics.

SMITH: Had your mother gone to a university?

KITZINGER: No. At that point, as I say, [she demonstrated] a remarkable degree of

emancipation from the bourgeois tradition in starting this kindergarten and this

welfare work, but by the time my sister grew up, this of course had become much

more of a professional proposition. [My sister] was actually employed by the Munich

community, again in child welfare at first, but then, as the Nazi business started, she

became very actively involved with trying to get Jewish children into Palestine. She

herself then emigrated to Palestine in 1938 and was very much involved there with the

problem of helping new immigrants. So it was a form of welfare, but in a very

different setting, with a very different purpose from what my mother had done.

SMITH: Had she become a Zionist?

KITZINGER: In a way, yes. Certainly for her the only answer to the German Jewish

problem was Palestine. She was very active there and involved with the kibbutz

movement, but she died of cancer in '43.

SMITH: Oh, that's unfortunate.

KITZINGER: But she was a very capable girl and achieved a lot in a short life.

SMITH: Did your parents leave Germany?

9

KITZINGER: My parents . . . this was an awful struggle. I remember my mother's
brother, who was a chemist, went to Turkey — not emigrating, actually, but being
transferred by his own firm, a big German chemical firm. They simply transferred him
to their Ankara outpost. I had been traveling in Egypt and the Near East, and I met
my parents in Ankara in the summer of '37. I will always remember how I pleaded
with them to leave, because to me at least it was quite obvious that there was
absolutely no future for them in Germany and that economically things would be
worse and worse. I could just see that the longer they waited, the more they would
become dependent on us children for their own maintenance. But they, like so many
older people, just couldn't manage until it was almost too late.

My father was interned after the Kristallnachl ', you know, November '38, in
Dachau, and he was then almost seventy. My brother and sister and I moved heaven
and earth to [get him out]. The only way you could get people released was if you
could show that you were able to emigrate. So I mobilized some of these wealthy
relatives who lived in England, who we otherwise never made any claim on. I
approached them and they provided the capital that was needed to get him a visa;
that's how he got released from Dachau, and my parents then left Germany in the
spring of '39.

SMITH: And came here?
KITZINGER: No, they went to join my sister in Palestine. The only place which you

10

could get admitted to, provided you had the required amount of money, was
Palestine. This country [England] was extremely difficult. They did come here in the
summer of '39 to visit me, but then they went back to Palestine. My father died there
just at the end of the war, in May of '45. My mother, a year or so later, came and
joined my wife and me in Washington, where she lived the last twenty years of her
life. She died in '66.

SMITH: Many people that I've talked to, the older generation, resisted moving;
particularly the men felt that Hitler couldn't last.

KITZINGER: Yes, well there was a lot of illusion in this. Basically it was an inability
to uproot oneself. I can see it myself, as I became older, how difficult it is to make a
really fundamental change.

SMITH: What is curious is the fact that you decided to become an art historian very
early in life. I've noticed in almost all of the other interviews that we've collected in
this series, that people rather stumble into art history relatively late in their career
after trying to be a novelist or a painter or something of that sort. But in your case
it's quite clear that you wanted to be an art historian when you were very young.
KITZINGER: Yes. In my family we were not observant Jews, but we did have bar
mitzvah — that's at age thirteen or so — and of course all one's parents' friends and
relatives gave one presents. I got a number of books on the history of art at that
point, so people must have already known that this would interest me.

11

SMITH: At that point you must have known.

KITZINGER: Well, I was beginning to; the orientation was there. I did a lot of
reading from then on, yes.

SMITH: And your favorite museum was the Alte Pinakothek.
KITZINGER: Yes

SMITH: Which works in the Alte Pinakothek did you like?

KITZINGER: When I think back to this formative period, it's the early Netherlandish
and German things that stand out, Roger van der Weyden and Albrecht Durer,
although I certainly looked at everything. The Rembrandts also were very important,
and the Rubenses. But the thing that I felt I wanted to get to the bottom of — what
was really going on there — were the fifteenth-century paintings.
SMITH: But you weren't yet then really exposed to Byzantine or Byzantine-
influenced art?

KITZINGER: No, no. One other thing that I should mention in that connection is
that we had a family doctor who was a personal friend of my father's. I don't think he
was a very pleasant man, but he had very strong convictions about how children
should be exposed to culture. It sometimes happened that my parents were traveling
or something and we had to be boarded, so I would spend a week with this doctor's
family. He had a daughter who was more or less my age, and I remember his taking
us to the Bayerische Nationalmuseum, the National Museum in Munich, which is very

12

much an arts and crafts museum, essentially. One of its great claims to fame is its
fantastic collection of Italian creche figures, and it has a lot of German late medieval
wooden sculpture.

This doctor forced me to look at a small group of Carolingian ivories, which
of course meant absolutely nothing to me. He was a pedagogue, so I had to write a
paper on these ivories. So there you have a case of early exposure to the things that
ultimately became very important in my own work, but which at that time, if anything,
put me off, because it was the wrong person who introduced me.
SMITH: Did you travel around Germany and go to the Berlin museums?
KITZINGER: Yes. My family did quite a bit of traveling, particularly in Bavaria,
Nuremberg a lot because we had family there, and the whole Main Valley. Then
when I was sufficiently advanced in age to go on bicycle tours I did that quite a lot. I
saw a lot of Bavarian baroque when I was going around on a bicycle with friends.
Then we had family in Berlin — my mother's sister was married in Berlin, and her
brother was there — so we went there quite often and I got to know the Berlin
museums.

Other parts of Germany I never got to know because there were no [family]
relations, or they weren't that close. One always said, "Oh, there's plenty of time. If I
don't see it now I'll go another time." Then of course suddenly in 1933 everything
came to an end. To this day I've not been to Dresden, for instance, and Saxony and

13

the whole of northeast Germany remain terra incognita. The Rhineland I did get to
know quite well after the war. I didn't get back to Germany until the late fifties, and
then I got to know Cologne, but other parts of Germany, as I say, I haven't been to to
this day. The natural magnet from Munich was always Italy, and we went on family
holidays to South Tyrol when I was twelve or thirteen. So that was my first exposure
to the Italian language, which I got to learn, and also to some Italian art.
SMITH: Did you get to Venice or Milan?

KITZINGER: To Venice, yes. I went for the first time with a friend before my last
school year, so I must have been seventeen, and it made a great impression. And then
after my first university semester, in the summer of 193 1, 1 went to Rome for the first
time.

SMITH: In your education you went, I presume, to the hamanistische —
KITZINGER: The humcmistische Gymnasium, the classical, which was fine for me.
Why my parents sent my brother there ahead of me, to whom this was absolute
anathema, I could never understand. There was an alternative, which was the
Realgymnasium, which was more geared to science and to modern languages, and
that's where he should have been. I never understood that. But for me the
humcmistische Gymnasium was right. The kind of education you got there of course,
in retrospect, was full of problems. You started Latin in the first year, you had nine
years of it, and at the end of it you could still not read a slightly difficult author with

14

any ease, and it was the same with Greek; you had six years of that. Latin you had
every day, Greek perhaps not quite every day but it was intensive, and what you
didn't learn, not just about the language but about the culture of these ancient
peoples, is incredible. Your [project] started too late for you to have interviewed
Otto Kurz, but you knew who he was.
SMITH: Yes

KITZINGER: He wrote some sort of autobiographical [piece] — I forget where I saw
it — in which he said that with him it was exactly the same. He grew up in Vienna and
he said that after nine years of Latin you could just manage a medium-grade author
with the help of a dictionary. And this was quite true. We spent the whole last year
of the Gymnasium on one Euripides play, chewing it up, you know, really taking it
word by word, and never getting any idea what the play was about, let alone what
Euripides was about, [laughter] The way that classical education had been desiccated
by the time that I experienced it is quite incredible.

SMITH: That's interesting, because people seem to talk about it in terms of the great
preparation it gave them.

KITZINGER: It did, in a way. Of course I remember when one talked to one's
parents, for instance, about the problems of this Latin training, they'd say, "Well, it
teaches you to think logically." That was the official line. It wasn't meant to
introduce you to ancient culture; it was meant as a mental exercise. Which in a way it

15

was, with that I quite agree. I always feel sorry for people who grew up with English

as their first language. They never got the framework of a systematic grammar that

Latin provides. So that is certainly true. I'm sure that it did a lot for one's ability to

think and to write, and that was what it was meant to do, but so far as classical

culture is concerned, no. I am very grateful I got as much Greek as I did, because

that became quite important. Although I feel less at home with a Byzantine Greek

text, because that's medieval Greek, and of course that has its own problems.

SMITH: Did your art history interests fit into the Gymnasium education? Was art

ever discussed?

KITZINGER: No, there was no art history at all. You had drawing lessons. There

was an art teacher, who was supposed to teach you to draw, which I was no good at.

He occasionally was supposed to tell you something about the history of art, but no,

that didn't play any part at all.

SMITH: What about modern literature?

KITZINGER: I should say to the last question, I remember in your last year at the

Gymnasium you were supposed to give a lecture. It was just a preparation for facing

an audience.

[Tape I, Side Two]

KITZINGER: I can't remember much, but I do remember choosing an art history

subject and standing in front of the class talking, but that was only because I

16

happened to be interested in that field; the school didn't provide any art history.

SMITH: Did you study philosophy at all at the Gymnasium?

KITZINGER: No.

SMITH: Modern literature?

KITZINGER: Ibsen was as far as we got, and that was only because the professor of

Greek, who actually was the head of the school and who was our classroom teacher

in the last grade, arranged for evening sessions with some of the more interested

students. We went through at least one or two Ibsen plays, but that wasn't really

officially part of the curriculum. I don't think it went much beyond Goethe and

Schiller.

SMITH: Okay, so it was very traditional.

KITZINGER: I'm not sure what we read of the later authors of the nineteenth

century, but certainly nothing of the twentieth.

SMITH: But possibly Heinrich Heine?

KITZINGER: Well, my father was a great admirer of Heine's and I was not, and

never have been. I love some of his poetry, though. Anyway, if German literature of

the postclassical period of the nineteenth century was taught at all it would be people

like [Eduard] Morike, or —

SMITH: OrNovalis?

KITZINGER: Novalis, yes. But not Heine.

17

SMITH: When you graduated from the Gymnasium and you got your Abitur, you
decided to go to university. I presume you're already pretty well read in art history.
KITZINGER: Yes, certainly more than average.
SMITH: Who had you been reading at this point?

KITZINGER. I suppose the most important author was Wolfflin. I've already
mentioned the sort of personal factor that came into this, but I just found this whole
approach extremely fascinating. Not that I knew much about alternative approaches
at that point. It was simply that he was a great man and he had been a professor in
Munich until not so very long before I became aware of art history. I actually heard
him once. He came back for a lecture, and this was a great event. He was a very
impressive figure. He gave his talk on klassische Kunst, and it was just fantastic. As
I say, I didn't really know at that point about alternative approaches, but it seemed to
me absolutely obvious that the things he was saying were true. When you compared
quattrocento and cinquecento painting, or Renaissance and Baroque and so on, [his]
Grundbegriffe — the principles of art history — were quite clear. So I took to it quite
naturally, and this was certainly the greatest influence.

I was mentioning books that I was given for my bar mitzvah, and they
included Georg Dehio's Geschichte der deutschen Kunst — History of German
Art — which had then just come out. I wouldn't say I "devoured" them, but I read
these tomes with great interest. Partly it was aesthetic; they were very nicely

I!

produced, and that had always played a strong part in my approach to books. So it
was there that I first learned about medieval art. [Dehio] starts with the Palace
Chapel in Aachen, so I learned about Carolingian and then Romanesque art. Those
two [authors] I would say, though extremely different from one another, were
probably the most important to me.

SMITH: Had you read [Paul] Frankl, [Erwin] Panofsky, or [Aby] Warburg?
KITZINGER: No, not before I got to the university. I did have a personal
connection with Frankl because he was a professor in Halle, and so was my father's
brother [Fritz Kitzinger], who was a [professor of penal law]. My uncle had a very
hard time. He was Jewish and he refused to have himself baptized, which was one of
the ways in which you could get a chair. Just as a matter of principle he wouldn't do
it. But he eventually got this chair in Halle, and his family and my family shared the
country house I mentioned near Munich. My uncle and his wife became good friends
of the Frankls in Halle, and they came to visit us in our country house. So Frankl was
probably the first major figure in art history that I got to know personally.

I remember that I wrote an essay — not as a task imposed on me — on three
[Albrecht] Diirer engravings: St. Jerome, Melencolia, and Ritter, Tod and Teufel.
My uncle showed it to Frankl and Frankl said this was certainly quite remarkable for
someone who hadn't had any training. I must have been seventeen or so. I didn't
know anything at that point about what Frankl had been doing, and of course Diirer

19

engravings were not exactly at the center of his own research.

Later on, when I did get to know his [work], I was very much impressed by
his approach to architecture, particularly his concept of "additive" and "divisive" as
two fundamental treatments of walls and of forms. It was in a way a spin-off from
Wolfflin, who had been his own teacher, applying another set of antitheses specifically
to architecture. I always remember him telling me how the idea of this contrast
between these two basic principles had come to him as he was waiting for a tram in
Halle or wherever, just as a flash, and that became a basic [idea] then in his approach
for the rest of his life. Of course that does happen, people have these inspirations. So
much for Frankl.

SMITH: You had to decide which university [to attend], who you would go to study
with.

KITZINGER: Well, in 1931 things were really pretty difficult economically. Both my
brother and sister had done what was usually done in Germany; they shopped around
different universities, one semester here, one semester there, which always to
Americans seems absolutely fantastic. By the time I got to that point it really would
have been difficult. Since Munich had a very good art history reputation, and for an
art historian travel would seem more important to get to know objects, my parents
thought it would be best if I enrolled there, where it would cost less money, which I
thought was very sound. So I started in Munich and the ordinarius there was

20

[Wilhelm] Pinder. There was a man called [Max] Hauttmann, who had come in
between Wolfflin and Pinder. He died early and Pinder became his successor in 1926
or '27 I think.

SMITH: I was a little surprised when I learned that Pinder was your dissertation
director, because it didn't quite connect.

KITZINGER: Well, this was force majeure — the force of circumstances.
SMITH: Perhaps you could talk a little bit about Pinder's style as a teacher. I do
want to go more into how you absorbed his concepts and the degree to which they
may or may not have been important to you, but you certainly attended lectures and
seminars with him.

KITZINGER: Yes. Of course in this first semester, the summer of '3 1, 1 did what
normally was done. Again, it always seems rather strange to a lot of Americans that
you shop around within the university, having a bit of this and a bit of that and you
just sit in on lectures. There are no exams, nothing; you just absorb things. I listened
to Karl Vossler, who was a great Romanist and a great friend of [Benedetto] Croce's.
He belonged to that kind of milieu. And [Fritz] Strich was a literary historian who did
very much the Wolfflin sort of thing in classic and romantic literature. I also listened
to a man who taught elementary physics, hoping to get to understand a little about the
theory of relativity, because that's what he was talking about, and to this day I have
not succeeded.

21

So there was a lot of listening around, and by the same token I went to
Pinder's course, which was three times a week, but without any obligation, so to
speak. I can't really remember what his subject was that particular term, but he also
had a one-hour kind of pro-seminar, a question-and-answer [session] where he would
just show slides, usually comparisons, and call on students to say what they could see.
So it was really an education in looking, and this made an enormous impression on
me. Of course it was already prepared by the Wolfflin tradition, although he was not
a student of Wolfiflin's. His teacher was a man called [August] Schmarsow. Pinder
was an extremely lively, very articulate and very inspiring teacher. In more recent
times I always said that in American terms, he was an ideal undergraduate teacher
because he introduced you to things and he stimulated you. He was not all that good
as a graduate teacher.
SMITH: Why was that?

KITZINGER: Because I think he was very much involved with his own research,
which at that time was all concerned with south German Baroque sculpture. One felt
he wasn't really doing much with the seminars that he did for the more advanced
students, which would be the equivalent of graduate study. He would assign themes
within the overall theme of that particular seminar at the beginning of the term, and
there was very little discussion. I don't remember whether you had to hand in your
report that you did for the seminar in written form. I think you did, but you got it

22

back with very little comment. And you didn't learn method from him at all; you only

learned to see.

SMITH: What do you mean, "to see"?

KITZINGER: To articulate what you were seeing.

SMITH: Okay, all right. There's a positivist understanding of what "to see" is, but

then there are other meanings.

KITZINGER: It was all based on comparisons. You would nearly always have two

slides on the screen, and usually things that were in some way related but were

different, say a Rubens landscape and a Derain landscape, and then you had to say

what made them so different, one from the other.

SMITH: In contemporary thought it's one's theoretical constructs that allow one to

see something and thus to articulate, so the theory speaks itself through the vision.

So in order to teach you to see there must be a need to teach you a theoretical

approach to the problem —

KITZINGER: You needed categories, and you'd have to break down what you were

seeing into composition, color, and use of outline. You could articulate what you

were seeing in such a comparison only by, as I say, breaking it down into different

aspects. And that's really what you learned — to isolate these different factors.

SMITH: So the aspects might be line, plane, color, texture?

KITZINGER: Yes

23

SMITH: Was there any interrogation of those categories?

KITZINGER: Interrogation?

SMITH: Well, relativization of the categories?

KITZINGER: No, I wouldn't say there was. We're talking about Pinder and his

teaching, and there was a certain amount of what would now be called, I suppose,

iconology. His whole message was very much in the form of apergus, of bons mots

almost. I remember, for instance, a quotation, I think from Max Liebermann: "A well

painted turnip is better than a badly painted madonna." [laughter] Subject matter as

distinct from absolute form did come in in things like this. Of course, once you talk

about turnips, then you can also talk about social aspects and all kinds of extraneous

factors that come into art. But essentially it was a question of learning to articulate

these various aspects of a work of art.

SMITH: But the various aspects were considered self-evident in some respects.

KITZINGER: Yes, yes

SMITH: Pinder was also concerned at this point with defining national style, or

defining national entities through the artistic styles. I've gone through different

German art journals of the period, and it seemed to be an obsession — distinguishing

German from Austrian, from Italian, so that there could be no question that Bavarian

art was actually German art and not Austrian art, and certainly neither was like Italian

art.

24

KITZINGER: I don't remember that Pinder tried to distinguish regional characters
within Germany, but he certainly was extremely voluble on the subject of German art
versus non-German art. I remember this, perhaps not from my first semester but
later, in '33 or so. The professor of art history in Munich was always supposed to do
a one-hour-a-week lecture for the general Munich upper-class citizens; this was
known as "five o'clock tea" because it was at five o'clock. His subject then was
German and French art, and the whole thing consisted of comparing a statue from
Reims with a statue from Bamberg, showing how utterly different they were. You
were never made aware of the fact that the Bamberg one wouldn't have existed
without the French having preceded it.

SMITH: When he compared the Rubens with the Derain, what were the
characteristics that he looked for?

KITZINGER: Well, in that context it was not a question of nationality; it was simply
a question of absolute categories of form. The same method was then used also in
comparing German and French sculpture, but there it really became a question of
trying to define eternal German characteristics.
SMITH: Did he succeed?

KITZINGER: He succeeded with a lot of people. He didn't succeed with me,
because this was blood and soil — Bint undBoden — applied to the history of art. I
remember his showing one of those early Germanic pieces of jewelry — metal work,

25

seventh or eighth century, with very intricate interlace. He made it clear, or tried to
make it clear that the principles involved there were the same as in a Bach fugue. So
it wasn't just in the history of art; it was a German character that expressed itself in
entirely diverse media. He was very much interested in music and he brought it into
his teaching.

SMITH: But at the same time that he was trying to construct this eternal German
style, he was also very much concerned with the problem of the generation and the
succession of generations.

KITZINGER: That's right, yes; that was an earlier phase of his, really. You see, he
came out of the First World War as a convinced European. If you read the preface to
his work on German sculpture, which was the pioneer work of his younger years, he
says there that while he was dealing with a period of German sculpture which had
really not been known, he always had in mind a European picture of which this was a
part. I think he genuinely believed that at that point. Although, in a way, you could
say there was a germ of a distinction between national styles within this European
picture, that in itself is not unjustified, as long as you don't then make it as being
eternally German from prehistory to the twentieth century.

SMITH: Of course implicit in the Hitler program was that Germany was the core of
Europe. Had Germany won the war, Europe would have been Germany.
KITZINGER: But I don't think Pinder ever was a supernationalist in that sense. I

26

think he was simply interested in defining the culture to which he himself belonged.
One of his sayings was, eine gute Zukanft ist nur moglich aufGnmd einer guten
Herkunfi — your future depends on your past, your descent. So he was interested in
tracing this eternal being within Germany, but not to the extent of its being superior
to all others.

SMITH: Just different, which is not unreasonable of course. There's also at least one
point in his career where he was trying to determine the biological basis for —
KITZINGER: Oh yes, I'm sorry, I meant to follow that up. In this generations
business there was of course a biological factor built in from the beginning; there was
a kind of biological law involved. I can't remember exactly when he formulated that.
It was still within his European phase and not connected with his German nationalism.
But this biological approach then merged very easily into this concept that there's
something in the German soul and the German blood that is eternally the same. So
you get from this generation thing quite easily into this nationalist thing. But they
were two different phases in his development.
SMITH: Did you find his writings interesting at the time?
KITZINGER: I was fascinated by his style. He wrote as he spoke; it was a very
fluid, very rich style, and I was much impressed with that. You have to bear in mind
that my whole contact with him was really rather brief. It was this first semester,
which certainly was a very fundamental experience for me, although, as I say, he was

27

not the only person I listened to. I listened to a lot of people there. I spent the
following winter in Rome, came back to Munich for the summer of '32, and the two
semesters following, and that was all. So Pinder wasn't a teacher in the way in which,
say, Panofsky was [Hugo] Buchthal's teacher; that was a totally different situation. It
was partly because of the circumstances, the time factor in this, and partly because of
the fact that Pinder was interested at that point in things that were of no particular
interest to me, quite aside from the political aspect.

SMITH: You attended Ernst Michalski's lectures. Could you talk a little bit about
him?

KITZINGER: Yes, in fact I was just going to talk about him. I was saying I didn't
learn scholarly methods from Pinder, but I did learn them from Michalski. He was
very much a connoisseur type of scholar. The main course I remember with him was
on Giorgione, where you really went methodically through every picture. Of course
with Giorgione there are only three or four pictures that are indisputably his, and all
the rest are a question of attribution. We spent this whole semester going
methodically from one picture to the next to decide whether that was Giorgione or
not Giorgione. So that was teaching a method, and that certainly made a great
impression on me at that point. Michalski was a nice person, I liked him.
SMITH: Of course the concern there was to define the distinguishing characteristics
of an individual artist, wasn't it?

28

KITZINGER: Yes, although of course Giorgione's whole development was only
about ten or fifteen years; the sequence of the pictures also comes into it. In part,
there it was the [Giovanni] Morelli approach, you know — how are the ears painted
and how are the fingernails painted and so on. So that whole aspect came in, and
there I learned more method, in a way, than I did with Pinder.
SMITH: And then you studied with Carl Weickert?

KITZINGER: Yes, but he was a classical archaeologist. The main classical
archaeologist was [Ernst] Buschor, who was very systematic. He had a four-
semester cycle in which you went through the whole of Greek and Roman art. It
didn't matter where you came in. You had to take all four in order to get the whole
cycle, but you could start with the Hellenistic period and then go to Roman and then
go back to Archaic and so forth. By going to every lecture you could learn the whole
history of ancient art. Buschor was very much making the object the dominant thing.
He would start the class by giving you, almost at dictation speed, the particular
material that he wanted to cover in that hour; then he would go to the back of the
lecture room where the projector was and he would look at the picture with you so
that you were all equally involved in the object. Again, it was this absolute
predominance of the visual. And he too of course had this biological [orientation].
He became a Nazi too. He saw certain inevitable elements of youth, maturity and
decay in Greek and Roman art — this biological aspect.

29

SMITH: As if those cultures were organisms?

KITZINGER: Yes. Weickert was more down to earth and more of a connoisseur
type of scholar, very much involved with objects in museums. I think he then went to
Berlin, I can't remember now. He was always half a museum man.
SMITH: Were you also studying philosophy or theology at this time?
KITZINGER: Aside from the main subject, which was the history of art, you had to
have two minors, one of which had to be classical archaeology — there was no
alternative. The other minor was your choice, and most people did history. I did
philosophy, hoping always to learn something about the basics of aesthetics. The main
philosophy professor in Munich was a man called [Richard] Honigswald, who was a
neo-Kantian. I was very much impressed by him. It must have been in the summer of
'32 and the winter of '32-33 that I actually attended his lectures, and I thought that at
certain times I got to understand Kant, who of course is an extremely difficult author,
even for people who speak German as their native language. Whether I ever really
did understand him I don't know. Honigswald started with the ancient Greeks and
went on to people like Descartes and Hume and Locke. His teaching was all keyed to
epistemology.

SMITH: Were you reading [Ernst] Cassirer at this time?
KITZINGER: No. I got to know him vaguely in London in the mid-thirties. I
started reading him because I realized that "symbolic form," in many ways, was

30

something that I was after. But I eventually decided I wasn't really a philosopher.

SMITH: You couldn't apply it to the concrete Byzantine?

KITZINGER: I tried hard with Cassirer, because as I say I found this very important

and very appealing, but I never really succeeded in applying it to my own work. Not

the way Panofsky did with perspective.

SMITH: At this time were you aware of [Martin] Heidegger, or [Edmund] Husserl?

KITZINGER: Husserl, no. I was aware of Heidegger because most students

circulate among German universities, so people who came back from Freiburg spoke

of the extraordinary terminology that they learned from Heidegger, but I realized that

I wasn't all that interested in it.

SMITH: Did you know about Sein und Zeitl

KITZINGER: I knew that this book existed, but I'd never read it. I've never read it

to this day. You see, although my interest was ultimately a philosophical one in

learning about the history of art, I realized I was not a philosopher.

SMITH: Well, that's fair. There are different ways of working with philosophy.

Then you decide to go to Rome, which actually reminded me of the themes that

Thomas Mann was writing about in the twenties, the north/south —

KITZINGER: Oh, I see. Well, of course Thomas Mann was, in a way, always torn

between his northern and his southern origins. I was always very much intrigued by

this.

31

[Tape II, Side One]

SMITH: But you don't think of your Rome experience as being particularly related to

Thomas Mann.

KITZINGER: No

SMITH: What drew you to Rome, then, at that time? Did you need to get out of

Munich, personally?

KITZINGER: Oh no. I got as far as Venice even before I went to university, but I

hadn't got beyond. I'd got to Florence also, I suppose. But then in my first summer

at university, the summer of '31, 1 wanted to extend my knowledge of Italian art. It

had been a sort of family decision that instead of spending money on going to

different universities in term time, I would try to see as much as possible during my

vacation time. So I went to Rome in the summer of '31 in order to see the Sistine

Chapel and Raphael's Stanze and Saint Peter's and so on. That was the sole idea in

this, and I was supposed to come back to Munich for the fall term.

I did what I had meant to do; I did look at the Michelangelos and the
Raphaels, but I discovered all on my own the Spatantike, the end of ancient art and
civilization. That had never entered my knowledge of things before. I had been very
much interested in Greek art as I saw it in the Glyptothek in Munich. Then the
Middle Ages began with Dehio, and Carolingian things, but there was nothing in
between. It never occurred to me that anything did happen in between, or why

32

ancient art came to an end. That was my own discovery in Rome in the summer of
'31.

I realized there was a city which in that sense really was eternal; it had gone
on beyond the time of the last Roman things that I had been taught about in
university: Trajan and Hadrian. It went on and there were things like the Baths of
Caracalla and the walls of Aurelian in the third century, and there was this collection
of early Christian sarcophagi (in the Lateran Museum at that time — they are now in
the Vatican) which were a total revelation, to say nothing of the arch of Constantine.
This was an overwhelming discovery. What was meant by the "eternal city" was that
it really had a continuity that I had never known about.

I must have written very enthusiastic letters home, because my parents wrote
and said, "You seem to be getting a lot out of this. Why don't you stay there for the
winter instead of coming back?" Which was an extraordinarily enlightened thing to
say, because this was '3 1 and there wasn't anything political about it; it was simply a
question of their feeling that this boy was developing in some way and they shouldn't
cut that short. It plunged me into a week of acute crisis, because I suddenly realized
that what I had been doing more or less noncommittally suddenly had the potential of
becoming a serious proposition that would have an effect on my whole life. It was an
extraordinary maturing process that took place within a few days, really, to realize
that this was something that I was seriously concerned with, rather than something I

33

was just toying with.

I decided that I would stay in Rome, which of course meant that I had to rely
very much on myself. Perhaps my earlier reading in art history that we spoke of, in
Gymnasium days, did have a bearing on it, because I was already used to working
with books rather than learning from teachers. I stayed in Rome for that winter, but
in order not to lose the credits, as one would say in America, I enrolled in the
University of Rome, and this turned out to have been a really crucial step because it
meant that when the Nazi business happened a year later, I at least had completed
four semesters. In Rome they actually went by year, but in German terms it was the
equivalent of the winter semester. Otherwise, by the summer of '33, 1 would have had
only three semesters behind me, and that would have been just too impossible.
Anyway, I enrolled in the university, but I very rarely went there; it was just in order
to have the documentation.

SMITH: Did you attend any of the art history lectures there? Was your Italian good
enough really to follow them?

KITZINGER: Italian was an optional subject in the last two years at the Gymnasium
and I had taken that, so I knew some Italian before I went to Italy, although it was all
reading; you learned it like a dead language. It was a nice man who taught us Italian,
and later, when I was in Rome that winter, he came there on a trip. We went to a
restaurant and I realized he couldn't order a meal. I had to order for my Italian

34

teacher. We had read a little Dante, but he couldn't order a meal, [laughter]

I did occasionally attend lectures, and the dominant figure there was Pietro
Toesca, who was a first-rate scholar, but very positivist. He was entirely wedded to
the object and its history, and not to any theoretical approach. When I went back to
Rome afterwards, after '33,1 did get to know him better and got to like him very
much, and I think he also approved of me. But more important than the lectures were
the guided tours that were arranged by the Bibliotheca Hertziana, the German art-
historical institute. Of course this was a natural base for me at that point, which is
hard to realize now, seeing that afterwards, in '33, the Hertziana became a sort of
propaganda institute for German culture. But in '3 1 it was, as it is now, a very serious
art history institute. I used the library and got to know some of the people there.
They had tours for more mature people who happened to be in Rome at that point,
but I was allowed to go along with them. I learned a lot from these tours and from
talking to the older fellows of the Hertziana.
SMITH: How did you divide your time up?

KITZINGER: Generally, I think my routine was mornings in museums, or with
monuments, afternoons in the library — that was more or less the division.
SMITH: Were you reading primarily about the monuments you had looked at, or
reading the history of the Roman Empire, or theology?
KITZINGER: More on the monuments I had been looking at. But having discovered

35

on my own that there was such a thing as the late antique, I then started to read up on
this, and the main figure that emerged from that was Alois Riegl, the Austrian
historian who had written in the first decade of the twentieth century. He really laid
the essential foundations for the study of this period. I then realized that what I had
discovered by myself had been discovered at least one generation earlier.
SMITH: I was actually going to ask you about Riegl, what you knew of his concepts
and how you understood something like Kunstwollen.

KITZINGER: I was much more concerned at that point with his analysis, say, of the
reliefs on the arch of Constantine, or the architecture of the Pantheon; that's really
what I was after at that point, rather than the theoretical underpinnings of this. But of
course later on I realized that by substituting a term like Kunstwollen for the
Wolflflinian purely formal categories, he had shifted the ground from a purely formal
analysis to the person or persons who generated all this. Kunstwollen is something
that's inside somebody, and how important that was and how close it was to my own
thinking I only realized later. In 193 1 I wasn't interested in Kunstwollen, but I was
very interested in Riegl as the discoverer ofSpdtantike.
SMITH: And you were reading about politics and culture.

KITZINGER: Not so much, no. This older fellow at the Hertziana, Harald Keller
[and I] became good friends, and he always later on teased me that I sat in the
Hertziana and copied into my little copybook the texts of the Klassiker der Kunst,

36

you know, those standard German texts ... on Titian and Raphael and so on. Well,
that wasn't true; it was a matter of teasing me. But I did read Riegl and [Franz]
Wickhoff. Wickhoff is another very important figure there, who really discovered
Roman art as distinct from Greek. There was a lady called Eugenie Strong, who was
then the director of the British School in Rome, and she had written a fairly basic
book on Roman sculpture, based on Riegl and Wickhoff. That's the kind of thing I
read.

SMITH: What languages were you working in then?

KITZINGER: I had no problem, so far as reading is concerned obviously with
German or with English. My parents decided at a very early stage that their children
should learn English, and so my brother and sister and I had private lessons in
English, I from the age of eight or nine. The idea was that you learned French in any
case, because that was an obligatory subject, even in the hamanistische Gymnasium,
so one needn't worry about French, but English was only an optional subject. Well,
less than halfway through my school years, the Germans, in their rage over the French
occupation of the Rhineland, abolished French as an obligatory subject and
substituted English. So by the time I got to the stage where one studied a modern
language, I had to start English all over again, when I already knew quite a lot. As a
result, I never really got to know French very well. I did take it as an optional
subject, as much as possible. I never spent much time in France, so French has

37

remained a weak point with me, always, though I had enough to be able to read. I

suppose that I read Emile Male, I'm not sure, and then later I read [Henri] Focillon.

But I wouldn't have had much occasion to read French at that point. It was mainly

German, English and Italian. And Russian came much later.

SMITH: Oh, you learned Russian as well?

KITZINGER: That's a later story. I don't really want to go into that now.

Russian is of course quite important for Byzantium.

SMITH: Yes, and you're the first Byzantinist I've interviewed who knows Russian.

Neither [Kurt] Weitzmann nor Buchthal worked in Russian.

KITZINGER: Well, Weitzmann had a Russian wife. People never realize that if it

weren't for Josepha, whose native language was Russian — she came from the Baltic—

SMITH: I didn't know that.

KITZINGER: Oh yes, that's an important part of the Weitzmann story. And

Buchthal?

SMITH: He never learned Russian.

KITZINGER: How did he manage with Russian literature? I can't say I ever

discussed that with him.

SMITH: I think it was a gap, basically. He said that it was something that he should

have learned, but he never did.

KITZINGER: Otto Kurz knew Russian quite well, and I think probably when

38

Buchthal worked at the Warburg, he probably got a lot of help from Kurz, who was a
very kind, very helpful person. But I don't know, I'm just guessing.
SMITH: Could you talk a little bit about the people at the Hertziana then, the people
that you were closest to?

KITZINGER: Well, of course you always have to distinguish between the pre-Nazi
and the Nazi period at the Hertziana. The director was a man called Ernst Steinmann.
He had written a huge, monumental work on the Sistine Chapel and was very much a
nineteenth-century figure, rooted in the German classic and romantic tradition, but I
didn't really get to know him. He wasn't much interested in a young student, and I
wasn't particularly interested in his writings, although his thesis I think had been on
tituli, meaning medieval verse inscriptions — that's how he had started — so there was
some link there.

The two people I got to know well at the Hertziana were Harald Keller and
Werner Korte. Keller was later a professor in Frankfurt, and he remained a lifelong
friend. He died about seven years ago. Keller's main subject at that point was
Giovanni Pisano. He was one of the last German art historians who considered the
whole history of art as his province. He wrote a lot on English Gothic revival, and he
really covered the map in the course of his life. But at that point his main interest was
late medieval Italian sculpture, and he was writing a book, which became quite
important, on the rediscovery of portraiture in late-medieval Italian art — papal tomb

39

effigies and so on.

Korte's interest was Italian Renaissance architecture, and he did some quite
fundamental work at that time on the history of the dome of Saint Peter's, showing
that it wasn't all Michelangelo. The great additional figure that he introduced was
Giacomo della Porta, who was involved with the Saint Peter's project. Korte was a
very good scholar, very exact. So from both Keller and Korte I absorbed a certain
amount of methodology without being in any way formally trained by them. Korte
then became a convinced Nazi in '33, and still, when I went back to Rome in '33-34, 1
tried to have discussions with him, but it was hopeless. Whatever he did, he did
absolutely to the end; that was true of his [work on] Saint Peter's dome and it was
also true of his conversion to Nazism. He served in the German army and fought in
Yugoslavia. He stayed on there until after the war had officially come to an end, and
I think he was killed by partisans.

SMITH: Did he become personally abusive to you? Did he reject you as a person?
KITZINGER: No. You see, as I say, we had quite civilized discussions during that
first Nazi winter. We realized that there was no way of bridging this gap, and then we
just didn't see each other anymore.
SMITH: Did he accept the anti-Semitism as well?

KITZINGER: I don't know. A certain amount of anti-Semitism I think is universal,
and I'm sure that somewhere there was an anti-Semitic strain, but he came to our

40

house in Munich. I still remember, he got married, and he brought his wife, who had

been a fellow student of mine in Munich, to our house. It was all quite civilized until

1933 . . . but a certain amount of anti-Semitism one is used to.

SMITH: Oh. You say that so casually.

KITZINGER: Well, Jews themselves tend to be anti-Semitic up to a point.

SMITH: Did you develop any Italian friends?

KITZINGER: No. Certainly not at that point.

SMITH: What was your social life like at this time?

KITZINGER: In that first winter there were young people around the Hertziana that

one got to know. I met Hugo Buchthal then and we became friends, because we had

similar interests. He was an influence on me too, because he wouldn't let anything

pass that wasn't fully thought out. Methodologically, I learned quite a lot from him.

SMITH: So he must have taught you the gospel according to Panofsky.

KITZINGER: Yes, I heard a lot about Panofsky from him.

SMITH: Did Panofsky's method make sense to you, the way Buchthal talked about

it?

KITZINGER: Yes, and then after my two further semesters in Munich, 1932 to

1933, I had decided that I would go to Hamburg because I wanted to get exposed to

something utterly different from what I had been doing up to that point. I never got

to Hamburg because Panofsky was dismissed in the summer of '33, and that was the

41

end.

The other institute which was important was the German Archaeological
Institute, whose head was Ludwig Curtius, a very impressive figure whom I did get to
know somewhat. He was a nineteenth-century humanist, who never became a Nazi.
The second director was a man called [Armin] von Gerkan, who was an architectural
historian — very much a bricks and mortar man. The difference between those two
was absolutely incredible. Once a month they had a lecture in the afternoon, and in
one program both directors were speaking. Curtius's subject was On revient toujours
a ses premiers amours, and Gerkan' s was: Zur Baageschichte des
Konstantinsbogens — something about how ashlar blocks were put one on top of the
other. Both of course in their way were important. Gerkan conducted weekly tours
of the forum and other ancient buildings or ruins, and I learned a lot from that. He
was a very down to earth archaeologist.

SMITH: What about learning about Greek architecture or Greek art? Not
necessarily of the classic period but of the Roman period, the post-Hellenist to
Byzantine — that gap.

KITZINGER: You mean actual monuments?
SMITH: Monuments, yes. Of course they wouldn't be in Rome.
KITZINGER: Well, not really. Of course I did become aware very quickly, in this
first encounter with the Spdtantike, of the importance of this Greek survival in the

42

East. But so far as actual monuments were concerned, there were the early Christian
monuments in Rome, and also Ravenna.
SMITH: So you went up to Ravenna?

KITZINGER: There was an international congress of Christian archaeology in
Ravenna in 1932, by which time I was back in Munich, but I went to this congress.
There for the first time I saw the monuments of Ravenna and became acquainted with
Christian archaeology as a discipline that was distinct from both classical archaeology
and the history of art. I became thoroughly convinced that this was not a legitimate
discipline; that partly it was theology and should be dealt with within theology and
church history, and partly it was art history. I'm not sure I believe that anymore, but
at that point I was thoroughly convinced that this was a mongrel, and the reason why
this intermediate period between ancient and medieval was such a terra incognita was
because it was the province of these people who weren't really art historians at all.
They were after quite different things — Christian dogma and so on. Since then I've
learned that there is a good deal to say in favor of treating that as a separate subject,
because you can't understand that art without knowing something about the church
fathers and the liturgy. But I still feel even now that it's often treated too much in
isolation from the rest of the history of art.

SMITH: I think maybe we should be wrapping this up for today, and we'll resume
with your going back to Munich and your dissertation, but I would like to ask you a

43

little bit about your exposure to the then contemporary or more or less contemporary

trends in German history and sociology. Did you know about Max Weber, for

example?

KITZINGER: Yes, through my brother and sister, since they had been in economics,

and Alfred Weber was a professor in Heidelberg, so I was aware of them.

SMITH: For instance, The Protestant Ethic in Capitalism might have been

something that you read?

KITZINGER: No. There are things that I was aware of because people were talking

about them. I read very little of Max Weber myself, but I was aware of him, certainly.

SMITH: What about Georg Simmel?

KITZINGER: Again, I was aware of him, but I don't think I ever read him.

SMITH: [Wilhelm] Dilthey? He was a little older perhaps, but a major figure in

terms of —

KITZINGER: Geistesgeschichte, yes, but this was only transmitted to me by others.

Dilthey was an influence on Max Dvorak, who certainly had a great influence on me.

This whole idea of Geistesgeschichte I got through Dvorak.

SMITH: Dilthey also influenced Panofsky, so it comes in different ways. But you

weren't actually reading much in terms of social history or political or cultural history?

KITZINGER: Well, I was very much aware of the need — I'm now talking about my

early work that first year, in '31, '32 — of knowing something about the history that

44

produced these monuments that I became so interested in. For the late Roman, there
was [Theodor] Mommsen, whom we all read, and then for the early Middle Ages
there was [Ferdinand] Gregorovius. His Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter
was a great work of historical scholarship. I read him only to realize that I could find
no tangible links at all between what he was telling me and what I saw in the
monuments. Obviously the same popes who built these early churches, or
commissioned these early mosaics also figured as historical personalities, but I could
see absolutely no connection. And this has been a problem, really, ever since. In a
way, my whole life's work has been an attempt to try to bridge that gulf for myself.
Of course that's where figures like Panofsky and others prove to be extremely
important. I did read people like Dvorak, who had already tried to deal with the work
of art in its historical context. And, as I say, I did read Gregorovius and realized how
important that was, but there was something missing in between. That's a crucial
point to which I'm sure we have to come back, because that's what I've been trying to
[solve] ever since.

45

SESSION TWO: 23 FEBRUARY, 1995
[Tape III, Side One]

KITZINGER: I think the last thing I said during our previous [session] had to do
with what I was observing in the field of late antique and early medieval art in my
early days in Rome, which was a new discovery to me. It had nothing to do with
what I found in books on the history of the period — there was a gulf. The essential
point there is that my reading of the art was entirely visual and stylistic. Of course
there were links between the monuments and the history, but there seemed to be no
bridge from my interest, which was in the development and changes of form, to what
was happening in Roman history at the time, and that was really the beginning of a
problem that has pursued me my whole life; namely, this idea that form has meaning,
and that changes in form and in style have something to tell us. I've never fully solved
this, but it has been a key theme of my whole life's work.

SMITH: That's actually where I wanted to start up today. You had mentioned also
that Max Dvorak became important for you in terms of working through this
problem. Was this the point when you were beginning to look at Max Dvorak's
writings on this topic?

KITZINGER: Actually, there is one quite short and crucial article of his which is
ostensibly about one mosaic in Rome of the early ninth century, in the church of San
Marco in Rome. With that as a topic he traces the history of Roman painting in the

46

early Middle Ages. It's a very brief article, but I thought it was absolutely right and

correct and set the accents where they should be. I don't remember really now to

what extent in that article he relates what happens in art to Geistesgeschichte, but

certainly this became to me a very important theme. The collection of Dvorak's

papers, which was published under the title Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte,

was to me a very important book, aside from his specialized writings on other

periods of art history.

SMITH: So with this problematic in mind you began to set up your dissertation

project?

KITZINGER: No, I'm talking now about 1931, when I was in my second semester

and I had no idea about a dissertation at that point. I was just absolutely struck and

fascinated by what I saw had happened in the realm of forms in art between the third

and the eighth centuries, in this period which previously to me had been a total void.

I discovered that important things happened. But I had no idea about a dissertation at

that point.

SMITH: When this question began forming itself, did you talk about it with the

people in Rome that you were in contact with?

KITZINGER: I don't think so, no. You talk about shyness. I was a little beginner

who should have been at a university writing down notes in lectures; instead I was in

Rome seemingly able to cope on my own. No, I can't remember, but I don't think I

47

discussed it with anyone.

SMITH: Okay, then you return to Munich. Did you discuss this question with

Pinder?

KITZINGER: Oh no, I didn't discuss things with Pinder. Well, I had this

extraordinary experience, arranged by my friends at the Hertziana, of having one

meeting with him when he came to Rome in the spring of '32. He hadn't been in

Rome for a long time, and they arranged for me to take him out for a glass of wine in

the evening after dinner, by myself. So there I had a chance to talk to him, but I can't

remember really what we talked about. I'm sure I talked about my discovery of

Spdtantike. What was so interesting was that this hit him too at that point, although

he was deeply involved with south German baroque sculpture. Why he came to

Rome at that time I don't really know, but this was simply a phenomenon of the

period; this crisis of the ancient world just hit anyone with any sensitivity who came

to Rome, and as a result of this Pinder actually gave a course the following year on

early Christian and early Byzantine architecture, which was totally outside his own

field. That was directly due to his experience in Rome.

SMITH: Did you attend that course?

KITZINGER: Yes, I did.

SMITH: Did it illuminate anything for you?

KITZINGER: Yes. His approach to the architecture of that period was also entirely

48

in stylistic, formal terms. The thing that he was particularly fascinated by was the

development of what he called the "double shell" architecture. Buildings like San

Vitale in Ravenna or Saint Sophia in Constantinople have a solid outer shell and a

transparent, perforated inner shell consisting of arcades and niches, which then creates

this undefined intermediary space between the inner and the outer shell; this is a key

to their whole character. This concept of the double shell stayed with me, and I must

have talked about it with Richard Krautheimer, with whom I was very closely

associated later.

SMITH: Was Krautheimer beginning to deal with the topics that were going to

become his life's work?

KITZINGER: Yes. Actually, we are distantly related. He came to my parents' house

when I was a small boy, when he came back from the war. But I didn't really meet

him until that first winter in Rome in '3 1 , when he was also based in the Hertziana and

had begun his project of a corpus of the early Christian basilicas in Rome, which then

took fifty years to complete.

SMITH: Did he have any ideas about why the forms did not seem to jibe with the

political or social history?

KITZINGER: He was at that point trying to find his own path through this medley of

forms in architecture, just as I was doing in the pictorial arts. At that time we talked

about [how to determine] what was really in the Roman, early Christian tradition, and

49

what was coming in from the East, from Byzantium; that was a key point that

bothered both of us. I don't know that we talked much about the political and social

relationships; it was all very much within the realm of art.

SMITH: I have one more question about the classes that you took, which was the

approach to training in terms of how to see. Would you say that there was a

systematic way of providing you and the other students with exercises that would

train you how to see, and how to define style?

KITZINGER: No, it was only through example. As I think I said last time, Pinder

made these comparisons and then encouraged his students to do the same, and

Buschor did the same thing. He would analyze the shape of a Greek vase, and it was

all by example, really, rather than indoctrination.

SMITH: I know that Adolph Goldschmidt, for example, had his students counting

the number of folds on an ivory, or the number of dots.

KITZINGER: No, this Munich approach was as far removed from Goldschmidt as it

was from Panofsky; it was seeing the form and understanding its meaning. And this,

as I say, has haunted me ever since.

SMITH: It's rather difficult to get a grasp as to what that means. I have a sort of

intuitive understanding, but there's something elusive about the concept.

KITZINGER: Well, the father figure in all this was Wolfiflin, and there after all, in his

Grundbe griff e, there were very concrete pairs of opposites. He applied his offene

50

Formen, and geschlossene Formen to the Renaissance, but you could use these same
terms in other areas and certainly form your own pairs of opposites on the same lines.
SMITH: Were these uses of binary oppositions dialectical? Was there a Hegelian
underpinning to it?

KITZINGER: I wouldn't say that, because they were not based on one generating the
other in a Hegelian way. In my own subsequent work, yes, this became very much a
dialectic . . . of course that, in a way, was prepared by Pinder's "generation" idea, with
the younger generation reacting and so on; that was in a way a dialectical process. So
those elements were there, but not in Wolfflin. WOlfflin was very absolute in
establishing what he called Gnmdbegriffe , through this development in time; those
were basic principles that applied everywhere and anywhere.
SMITH: In 1933 Hitler comes to power, and you decide you have to get out.
KITZINGER: But I was then on my way to Hamburg. In regard to this basic
problem of form in history I didn't feel I was getting any further in Munich, and I was
pretty sure that a term with Panofsky would help me a lot, because I knew that he
made his students read texts that had a bearing on art. He also paid much more
attention to the content of pictures and of figurative art in general than was done in
Munich. I thought that perhaps through him I would be handed a key to this problem.
Of course I never got to Hamburg. I was on my way in the spring of '33 and I got as
far as Berlin, where I stayed with relatives, and during that time everything collapsed.

51

I knew that Panofsky wasn't teaching anymore, and so I returned to Munich.

SMITH: You had met Hugo Buchthal in Rome during your year there?

KITZINGER: Yes. Certainly he was there during part of that time I was there, in

'3 1-32. He was working on his thesis on the Paris Psalter. It was through him

mainly that I knew what was going on in Hamburg, and about Panofsky.

SMITH: Was he also interested at this time in this juxtaposition of form and social

and political history?

KITZINGER: No, I wouldn't say that. What we both were concerned about was the

role of Byzantium. Of course Buchthal's key monument was actually Byzantine, but

in my case it was a question of trying to identify the Byzantine elements that got into

Western art.

SMITH: You had mentioned in passing that he was sort of like an older brother to

you.

KITZINGER: Well not brother, mentor I would say. He was three years older and

he had had far more training, obviously. He also had, and I suppose he still has, a

natural pedagogical gift. He would sort of tear you away firmly when he thought you

were doing the wrong thing.

SMITH: And of course you have a shared interest in the late antique, in a sense, but

his actual work was a little later.

KITZINGER: Yes, the manuscript that his thesis was on is of the tenth century and is

52

a key monument of the so-called Macedonian renaissance in Byzantine art, when
there's a revival of much earlier forms. His main concern was tackling the ideas that
Weitzmann had started publishing. They were really at loggerheads so far as the
internal development of Byzantine art was concerned, in that Weitzmann saw this
tenth-century renaissance as a very drastic renaissance, a return to much earlier forms,
and denied any antecedents in the preceding centuries, whereas Buchthal was more
inclined to see a development leading up to this. That's where his work and mine
touched very closely. My Roman monuments were seventh and eighth centuries, and
we agreed on the Greek or Byzantine influence upon them and therefore they could
reflect the art that did precede and could have influenced the Macedonian revival. So
Buchthal and I had this interest in common, in this rather dark period, say from the
sixth century on, from the time of Justinian through the seventh and eighth century,
and that's really what we were talking about, rather than links with other fields.
SMITH: But of course at the same time he was explaining to you the Panofsky
method.

KITZINGER: Yes

SMITH: As you read Panofsky, did Buchthal's explanations of Panofsky ring true?
Maybe "ring true" isn't the right word, but what I'm trying to get at is whether
Buchthal had a special, individual interpretation of Panofsky.
KITZINGER: I'm not sure how much we really discussed Panofsky's methods in

53

general. What he conveyed to me was the whole Hamburg atmosphere and the
experience of a student. I'm not sure how much of the writings of Panofsky I read at
that point because in my first year in Rome, in 1931-32, 1 was really involved with the
Roman monuments and reading up on them, and then when I returned to Rome in the
summer of '33 it was under terrific pressure to write a thesis, so there wasn't much
[time].

You see, you have to realize this was a real turning point that summer. The
normal time for a student in Munich, or anywhere really, was at least five years — ten
semesters — and I had four semesters at that point. So the realization that I was going
to try to finish within a year really cut short any kind oijoie de vivre.
SMITH: Yes. When did you realize that the Nazis might actually come to power?
KITZINGER: I suppose, during that winter, 1932-33, it became clear. The only
question was to what extent they would still be willing to share power with
conservative German nationalists. What I think very few people foresaw was how
radically they were going to push aside any kind of opposition, from the right as well
as from the left. And so the dictatorial nature of the regime I think one didn't become
fully aware of until later on in '33. But that this was not going to blow over in a hurry
was clear. Much clearer to younger people than to older people.
SMITH: Did you have friends who became Nazis?
KITZINGER: Yes. I think I've already talked about the Hertziana and particularly

54

Werner Korte, who certainly became a Nazi. I didn't make a lot of close friends

among my costudents in Munich, but certainly the number of them that suddenly

appeared in Nazi uniforms during that summer was quite alarming.

SMITH: After the takeover?

KITZINGER: Yes.

SMITH: Were there people who surprised you?

KITZINGER: It became almost a daily occurrence, and you ceased to be surprised at

any of them. You just found yourself wondering what would you yourself do if you

had to make a decision.

SMITH: Pinder became a Nazi, or he joined the party at any rate.

KITZINGER: I'm not sure that he joined the party. Do you know this for a fact?

SMITH: I believe so, yes. It's a question mark whether Buschor joined the party, but

he was certainly sympathetic. Did that affect their relationships with you?

KITZINGER: Well, I'm a little worried about using the word "relationship" at all.

For instance, in the case of Buschor, he didn't like art historians who just took

classical archaeology because they had to, and he kept at a safe distance. I don't think

I ever had a personal talk with him at all. With Pinder it was just this accident that we

had met in Rome in "off campus," as one might say in America, circumstances.

SMITH: Nonetheless, you were his student and you made a proposition to him that

you needed to finish in a year, and you were dependent upon him and two other

55

colleagues —

KITZINGER: To let this happen.
SMITH: Yes

KITZINGER: I went to see him towards the end of that summer term, of '33, saying
that I felt if I were to get a Ph.D. I would have to get it very quickly, because at any
moment there might be a decree preventing Jewish students from getting a degree.
The only subject that I felt I could work up into a thesis within a relatively short time
was early medieval painting in Rome, because of this earlier stay in Rome, about
which he knew. I said I would try to write a thesis within the following year, but of
course I realized that this was entirely unorthodox from the point of view of Munich
practice because he normally required at least ten semesters, and at this point I was in
my fifth. While according to strictly bureaucratic rules it was possible to get a degree
in six semesters, in three years, I would have to try to do it within that minimum
period. Pinder's answer, which I have never forgotten, was Ich werde Ihnen keine
Hindernisse in den Weg legen — I will not put any obstacles in your way. But the
emphasis was on the "ich" — implying that he obviously couldn't promise what
university regulations or anyone else might do. So the other subjects didn't come into
this at all. The main point was that I had what I would call a gentleman's agreement
with Pinder that he would not make things difficult for me if I tried to get this whole
thing [completed] within a year.

56

SMITH: So you proceeded to try.

KITZINGER: I proceeded to try, yes. Pinder became a Nazi, but he felt very
uncomfortable, particularly vis a vis his Jewish students and colleagues. He realized
there was a problem there, and he tried to make up for the path that he was taking by
being very helpful and friendly.

I was not the only one. He had had students like [Nikolaus] Pevsner, and
Michalski, whom he had actually habilitated in Munich, and there was another Jewish
Privatdozent (Strauss),whom he had accepted in Munich. So he had a lot of Jewish
connections.

SMITH: Was the rabidness of the anti-Semitism that developed when the Nazis took
power a surprise to you — the fury of it?

KITZINGER: Yes. Although as I think I said last time, having grown up in Munich,
I was used to it from the early twenties on; one knew this and saw it all over the
place. I think the violence of this anti-Semitism in office was a surprise, though, yes.
SMITH: Were there people that you knew, with whom you had been cordial or
friendly, who were [influenced] by the violence of the anti-Semitic propaganda and
the hatred that was being stirred up?

KITZINGER: I can't say that any of my personal friends from childhood on became
enemies, no. They all maintained their reasonable attitude. So I can't say in my own
personal relations there was any real major disappointment.

57

SMITH: You took your oral examinations in the summer, or when you completed

your dissertation?

KITZINGER: No. The oral examination goes with the handing in of the thesis —

that was in the autumn of 34. In between there was this whole winter in Rome.

SMITH: So you go back to Rome to write your dissertation. Could you talk a little

bit about how you began to frame your dissertation, what you wanted to achieve with

it, and what your goals were, aside from doing something that you could finish in nine

months?

KITZINGER: Well, my goal in this dissertation was to try to make sense of a very

curious succession of styles in dated monuments. You had a chronological

framework but it was very difficult to make sense of it in terms of any kind of organic

development. This is where that Dvorak paper, which had been published many years

before, came in, because that's precisely what he had been trying to do in a very broad

way. It was because of this attempt to make intrinsic sense of the development of

forms that I had difficulty in bringing in history. Because of the immediate purpose —

this very definite time limit in which to produce a dissertation — I just concentrated on

the problem of the development of style between the sixth and the ninth centuries, in

Rome.

SMITH: In terms of wall paintings, and wall decorations?

KITZINGER: Wall painting and mosaic.

58

SMITH: Only in the city of Rome?

KITZINGER: Only in the city of Rome

SMITH: How large a body of work did you have to deal with then?

KITZINGER: You mean how many monuments?

SMITH: Yes, how many monuments, or fragments of monuments.

KITZINGER: Well, the absolutely crucial monument is Santa Maria Antiqua, a

church in the Roman Forum, which had been discovered only about a generation

earlier, in the very first years of this century, by dismantling a baroque church that had

been built over it. The ruin of a Roman building came to light, and it had these layers

of painting, partly one on top of the other, so that you actually had a tangible

chronology because one was earlier than the other, spanning a period from the sixth

to essentially the ninth century. If it hadn't been for Santa Maria Antiqua one couldn't

have done this work at all.

The other monuments would have been, let's see . . . half a dozen churches
with mosaics, mostly just an apse mosaic, and then scattered wall paintings in other
churches. The total volume of monuments was not that great, and that was one of the
encouraging aspects of this thing. I wasn't faced with hundreds of monuments I
would have to sort out. Coming back to Pinder for a moment, what I was trying to
do was more or less what he had done with German sculpture — trying to make sense
of it in purely stylistic terms.

59

SMITH: And was Kunstwollen a useful category for this endeavor?
KITZINGER: Not really. I think at that time I didn't really use that term at all,
because as I think I've said already, by substituting Kunstwollen for "style" you really
shift the focus from the hand to the mind and the brain, and that was precisely what I
was hoping to do eventually but wasn't trying to do at that point.

Later on, when I developed this line of thought, I based myself on David
Riesman's antithesis of "inner-directed" and "other-directed." He used these terms for
entirely different purposes, but I adopted them, and it only dawned on me gradually
that "inner-directed" really is Kunstwollen, as distinct from "other-directed," meaning
things that are imposed on the artist from the outside.
SMITH: That's interesting. We'll have to get into that.
KITZINGER: Yes, but I hadn't really realized that until much, much later.
SMITH: I know that you went to talk to Toesca about your project. What kind of
advice did he give you on what you were doing?

KITZINGER: Well, it was just one interview, really. I don't recall the circumstances.
I must have asked whether I could see him because I was developing these ideas
about what was happening in painting in Rome between the seventh and the ninth
centuries, which was certainly something that he had been concerned with and was
interested in. But I was obviously doing it on a very abstract, theoretical basis, with
the result that he then just cut me short with the remark, "That isfilosofia

60

tedesca" — that's German philosophy. Of course I had all these ideas about
generations reacting and so on, the sort of thing that I had grown up with, and he was
a positivist if ever there was one; what mattered was the particular monument and its
date and the artist who did it, his training and so on.

SMITH: Did you feel that in your dissertation you were able to resolve these
questions that you posed?

KITZINGER: Up to a point, yes. I felt that I had arrived at a conspectus, whereby
things happen according to some kind of inner logic. One factor in this I haven't
mentioned yet is Myrtilla Avery, who was a student under Charles Rufiis Morey in
Princeton. Under his tutelage she had written an article — I suppose it was really her
thesis before it became an article — on the paintings of Santa Maria Antiqua. This had
appeared seven or eight years earlier, and in a way my whole treatment of this subject
became a polemic against Myrtilla, whom I didn't know at that time. To her (as to me
also) the most important thing that you saw happening at Santa Maria Antiqua,
because you had these layers one on top of the other, was a sudden appearance of a
very pure Hellenistic style.
[Tape III, Side Two]

KITZINGER: Morey had developed this antithesis within the eastern Mediterranean
world between Asiatic and Alexandrian art, Asiatic being sort of protomedieval and
abstract, and Alexandria, which is where Alexander first flourished, was the conserver

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of Hellenism. Miss Avery's thesis consisted in showing that there was a group of
artists, or perhaps even one artist only, who had come from Alexandria to Rome,
probably fleeing from the advancing Arabs, and imported this Alexandrian style to
Rome. In fact her article was called "The Alexandrian Style at Santa Maria Antiqua."
I don't think she knew about Dvorak's article, which I think is a little sad — how
isolated this Princeton group was. I never asked her when I got to know her, or
Morey subsequently, whether they had actually read it. She certainly doesn't quote
him, as she should have.

To Dvorak this was a total revolution in Roman painting in the seventh
century, with a return to antiquity, really, to Greek Hellenistic forms, and not just an
isolated incident at Santa Maria Antiqua. I entirely sided with him in trying to show
that the whole subsequent development in Rome was based on this intrusion from the
East. This [argument] became interesting for Buchthal because he was looking for
precisely that kind of Hellenistic tradition still alive in those centuries to account for
what happens in the tenth century with his Paris Psalter. Nowhere can you prove it as
clearly as in Rome, through this invasion.

SMITH: So this is happening simultaneously with the iconoclasm in the East?
KITZINGER: It depends a little on who you listen to, but it's either very early
seventh century or the middle of the seventh century. Iconoclasm starts in 726, and
then leads to the emigration of artists, but this Hellenistic wave in Rome is earlier.

62

SMITH: I think related to this is your participation in the Ravenna congress. You
were quite young at the time.

KITZINGER: Yes, this was still in the peaceful period, before '33. That congress
took place in the autumn of '32, but I had had my first year in Rome and knew that I
wanted to be involved with late antique and early Christian art, so I went to this
congress. It was a great experience. First of all, in '32 I was just going on twenty,
and to see all these great scholars whom I had read or heard of, actually in the flesh . .
. I was of course a little mouse in the corner, [laughter]

But my main reaction was that I questioned the whole idea of this Christian
archaeology, which is what the congress was about. It had started earlier; this wasn't
the first of those congresses. I think it was the third, and they have been going on
ever since, every four or five years. I felt that art wasn't getting its due in this, that
people were talking a lot about literature, and texts, and liturgy, and various other
things that happened during that period, and the monuments were only illustrations of
things that were of interest to theologians and church historians. Art was a
handmaiden, and I found that entirely wrong. I was trying to see art as an important
phenomenon that gave [significant] evidence in its own right, particularly in its
stylistic development, so I was out of sympathy with the basic [tenet of the congress],
but of course at the same time I learned a lot about other things.

I had been commissioned by one or two newspapers to send them reports on

63

the congress. The Catholic papers in the Munich area were particularly interested in

this kind of thing. I forget to what extent that actually financed my attendance.

Anyway, I did write reports about this congress which were very much on those lines,

saying that it was unsatisfactory from the point of view of art history, and that

Christian archaeology should be abolished; these people should go to their own fields

and leave the art to the art historians. Which of course shows how little I at that

point was able to connect; and we're back to that problem.

SMITH: Yes, but certainly you weren't the only one. Buchthal mentioned that he

still feels that Byzantine art historians and Byzantine historians have very little to say

to each other.

KITZINGER: Well, if we get to talking about Dumbarton Oaks, then this will be

quite crucial.

SMITH: Yes, we'll get to that later. So we mentioned Avery. Were there other

sources that were important?

KITZINGER: I should say that I'm anticipating at this point, because I'll never forget

my first visit to Morey in Princeton after I got to America. I formed a great liking for

him. He was a great person, and while we disagreed on almost everything within our

field, I got to admire him very much, and in her own way, Myrtilla Avery also became

a friend. Just the other day I came across letters that I had from her. So, this early

polemic did not prevent friendships later on. They were both very good people.

64

SMITH: Let's pursue this a little further. You had disagreements on virtually

everything?

KITZINGER: Everything. Method and substance.

SMITH: All right. So the substantive disagreements were based on methodological

disagreements?

KITZINGER: Yes

SMITH: Which are based, I presume, on completely different theoretical approaches

to what art is, to the relationship of art to society.

KITZINGER: No, I think society didn't come in at all; this is later in the century,

projecting back. The Morey method was essentially a statistical one. He founded the

Princeton Index of Christian Art, which cataloged monuments according to very

concrete, tangible criteria. Say, whether Christ carries a cross-shaped scepter or not,

whether in a crucifixion the man with the lance is on the left or on the right — very

solid points like that. He tried to establish that certain practices of that kind were

typical of particular workshops or particular schools. It was on that basis, for

instance, that he established an Alexandrian tradition, because the idea was that once

such a practice had been adopted in one school, it stayed there. It was very

mechanical and very easy to handle, and of course he had lots of students.

If you look at the Art Bulletin from the 1920s to at least the first part of the
'30s, it's full of these articles that were based on this method. Early Christian

65

sarcophagi, which were produced in workshops, lent themselves very well to this kind
of approach: the apostle Peter always wears a certain garment, and so on. So
society, or any larger themes, really didn't come into this; it was very much an internal
sorting out of monuments. By having established this system, you might say, it was
very easily adopted then by others, so this became the Princeton school. When I
started in this field, that was the only thing that was going on. The earlier period, of
Josef Strzygowski, was really passe. You know, he was the great Austrian art
historian at the beginning of the century, who subsequently went totally astray. That
period was passe, and the only contemporary thing at that point was going on in
Princeton. So I had this American connection, oddly enough, right from the
beginning, before I even thought I would ever go to America.
SMITH: Did the methodology make any sense to you? I mean, regardless of
whether you agreed with it or not.

KITZINGER: No, I think I always saw its limitations. But at the same time I
thought it could be used in a certain way. While I was writing my dissertation, I
knew that to fully understand the development of styles in this two-hundred-year
period I would have to get into subject matter, or content, and this was actually
something that Hugo Buchthal and I then tried to do together when I was in England
in '35. We were kind of trying to beat the Princeton school at their own game by
adopting their method of iconographic detail and trying to make it work in terms of

66

development in Byzantium. The curious thing about Morey and his school was that
with all their immersion into the eastern Mediterranean, they really left out
Byzantium; they left Constantinople out. It was always Asia Minor versus
Alexandria, and Constantinople didn't emerge until about six or seven hundred years
after its founding.

Morey had dated Buchthal's lovely Paris Psalter, as a key monument, into the
seventh century and made it Alexandrian because it had this Hellenistic style. So
Buchthal and I tried to do a sort of Princeton-type study of the Roman monuments of
the seventh and eighth centuries in order to show that the main development at that
point took place in Constantinople. Iconoclasm was an interruption, but the essential
preconditions to what then developed in Byzantine art after the end of Iconoclasm
were already laid in this period. I still believe that the seventh and eighth centuries are
extremely important for this subsequent Byzantine development, and that the main
area where you can study this is in Rome.

SMITH: So you complete your dissertation, and you return to Munich to get your
doctorate?

KITZINGER: I came back in the summer of '34 from Rome, and then spent all my
time trying to prepare for the oral exams. I handed in the dissertation and then started
boning up on classical archaeology on the one hand — Buschor's exam — and
philosophy, my second minor, which was a problem in itself. I think I mentioned

67

Honigswald as the man whose lectures I listened to. "Taken courses with" is a phrase
I'm always trying to avoid. You didn't take courses, you just listened to lectures.
Then there were seminars, but in your minor you got very little into seminars, and
certainly not with the head man. I think in classical archaeology I had seminars with
Weickert and [Hans] Diepolder, but in philosophy, no.

Honigswald had departed and I don't remember his successor's name at all.
He was a real Nazi, whose interest I think was gnosticism. That's all I remember.
Anyway, it was totally out of the question, my being examined by him, so the only
alternative was a Catholic philosopher by the name of Geyser, who had never set eyes
on me. I had never listened to his lectures, but he was to be my examiner in
philosophy. Do you want me to talk about this oral exam?
SMITH: Yes.

KITZINGER: Pinder was known to confine his oral exams to the subject of the
thesis. Just to interject, this was very different from Panofsky, who was well known
for ranging over the whole history of art with his students. His whole idea was that a
Ph.D. meant that you had command of the whole discipline, and he could ask
anything out of any period. Whether he actually did this in every case, I don't know,
but anyway he had this reputation, and Pinder didn't do that. In my case, I don't think
he even read the thesis, [laughter] I think when I got it back there were just a few
spelling [corrections] here and there. It was of no interest to him.

68

His interest, as I say, was baroque sculpture. He had done this one course on
early monuments after he had been to Rome, which was I think entirely about
architecture, because architecture from way back had been an interest from his own
dissertation on Romanesque art in Normandy. So these paintings [I wrote about]
were of no interest to him, but he kept his word. As I say, if he had done a Panofsky-
type thing, he could have failed me easily, but he didn't, and so he kept to his word
that he wasn't going to put any obstacles in my way, which meant he wasn't going to
ask impossible questions.
SMITH: So what did he ask you about?

KITZINGER: Well, it was mostly a chat about Rome, as far as I remember — our
common experience in Rome in that Spring of '32. Then halfway through this, he
said, "There's one question I want to ask you." He became quite embarrassed and he
said, "You know, it's sometimes said that to talk a lot with one's hands is a Semitic
characteristic." Here I have a catalog from this exhibition we just saw in Munich,
[showing catalog] Here is one of the great manuscripts of the Ottoman period, which
to Pinder, and to everybody, was one of the high points of German art of the tenth
and early eleventh centuries, and there these people talk a lot with their hands. Pinder
asked me, "How do you explain this?" In 1934, in this whole situation, that was just
an incredible question to ask of a Jewish student.
SMITH: How did you answer?

69

KITZINGER: I said, "Well, I think that these Ottoman miniatures owe a lot to
miniatures previously done in the eastern Mediterranean area, Syria particularly. We
have illuminated manuscripts of that period, from the East, and there are people who
talk with their hands." But it was just an incredible thing to happen in what is
supposed to be a serious exam. Anyway, this hour went by, and then it was time for
Buschor. He was known to take you either to the cast collection, which was right
next door to the Archaeological Seminar in Munich, in the Hofgarten, and you had to
talk about particular sculptures, or else he had a stack of photographs and he handed
them to you and you had to say what they were. With me it happened to be the latter.
I had spent days and days going through the photographic boxes in the archaeological
institute, and he started handing me things, and I was able to identify quite easily what
each thing was.

SMITH: Was this a question of identification?

KITZINGER: Yes, it wasn't really a question of discoursing on anything — just dates
and what kind of object it was. I remember one object was eitie Greifenprotome . It
was a large bronze vessel of the Archaic period, which had handles in the form of
gryphon heads. They were known as Greifenprotomen, and you had to say it was a
Greifenprotome — that kind of thing. After about ten minutes of this he said, "This is
a farce. Good-bye." Which was unusual. I can't remember whether it was meant to
be an hour or less, but certainly it was meant to be more than ten minutes. So that

70

was that.

And then philosophy, with this man whom I had never heard lecturing, who
had never set eyes on me. Knowing that he was a neo-Scholastic, I had done as much
[reading] as I could on Scholastic philosophy in this short period of preparation that I
had, only to be confronted with his announcement, "I want you to talk about
Hobbes." This of course immediately threw me. I tried to recollect where Hobbes
had come into the sort of pre-Kantian period in Honigswald's lectures and I started
talking about epistemological aspects as far as I could remember them. He said, "No,
I want you to talk about der Begriffder Seek" — Hobbes's concept of the soul. I had
absolutely nothing to say on this. You know, it was the sort of thing that students do,
they try to shift to another thing that they do know a little about. But he wasn't to be
budged, and this whole hour went by, his trying to extract something out of me about
Hobbes's concept of the soul.

To this day I don't know what went on in this man's mind, and to me it was
one of the worst hours in my life, because I realized I was failing this, and if you failed
one of your three subjects you failed the whole thing. You could I think repeat after a
year or so, but that was no option in my case, so this was an absolutely horrible
experience. To this day I don't know what possessed this man to do this. So then the
three professors were supposed to get together, which they did, and I still remember
walking up and down the corridor [near their meeting place] in the university and then

71

Pinder coming out and saying, "It's fine." I said, "Even the philosophy?" He said,

"Well, Professor Buschor and I reasoned with Geyser, saying it wasn't really of any

great importance in terms of what you were planning to do in your life, so he agreed."

Of course it was all due to these absolutely extraordinary circumstances. In normal

circumstances I would have failed.

SMITH: Do you know if Pinder was as accommodating to other Jewish students that

he had?

KITZINGER: I don't know any concrete cases like my own, where he really had to

go into action, but he certainly didn't make difficulties for any Jewish student of his

that I knew, and there were several.

SMITH: You mentioned last time that you had some contact with Buschor after the

war. Did you have any contact with Pinder before he died?

KITZINGER: Not directly, no. Only indirectly in that one of my fellow students in

Munich in '32, '33, was Elizabeth Holt, an American, who had gone to Munich

because women at that point were still discriminated against in getting a Ph.D. She

had been at Harvard. We didn't get to know each other very well, but we became

good friends later on when I moved to America, because she lived in Washington,

which is where I was. Her husband was in the military government in Germany at the

end of the war, and so she reestablished contact with Pinder at that point. It was

through her that I heard a little about this last very sad period in his life. But I had no

72

direct contact with him.

SMITH: No, okay. So, you were finished, and you had your Ph.D. Didn't you then

have to get your dissertation published?

KITZINGER: Well, this was at the end of November, and I literally left the next day,

because there were rumors that men of military age were stopped at the frontier. Of

course whoever stopped you wouldn't necessarily know whether you were Aryan or

non- Aryan, but it was not a risk to take. I thought that the more quickly I could get

out the better, so I left and went back to Rome.

You were supposed to submit your thesis exactly as accepted by the
professor, and publish it, or print it. But that in practice was no longer being enforced
because most theses were far too long for a periodical article and unless a publisher
accepted the book, which was not very likely, you had to pay for printing yourself. In
the economic conditions as they generally were from the late twenties on, this was no
longer enforced. I did want to get some of these results that I had reached in this
work into a periodical, as at least a longish article, and so my first task in Rome after
returning there in late '34 was to try to condense the whole thing into an article.

One of the German contacts I still had in Rome was Johannes Kollwitz, who
was the assistant for Christian archaeology at the German Archaeological Institute in
Rome. He was a priest and not under any Nazi domination. I got to know him quite
well, and he was interested in what I was doing. He was interested himself more in

73

church architecture of the late antique and early Middle Ages. He had a connection
with the Camposanto Teutonico, next to Saint Peter's, which is the old established
German Catholic base in the Vatican. They published a periodical called Romische
Quartalschrift [fur christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte], which was
essentially for church history and textual studies, but also archaeology. He thought he
could get a longish article, based on my thesis, into that periodical. So I had that in
mind in trying to condense what was really quite a fat manuscript into a manageable
size.

I still remember writing to Pinder about this, and his writing back, "I
congratulate you on the wonderful solution which the Romische Quartalschrift is
providing." Only it then turned out that while this periodical was being published in
Rome, it was printed in Germany, in Freiburg, and they couldn't do it with a Jewish
author, so that came to grief. I had by that time a very condensed version of this
thesis, and then eventually I had it printed in Munich and I handed over the obligatory
two hundred copies to the university, and that was it — without any illustrations. I did
it as cheaply as possible.

SMITH: This was done long distance, since you were in Italy?
KITZINGER: Yes, of course I did not go back to Germany after this sudden
departure in '34. The first time I went back to Germany was in '58 — twenty-four
years later. But my parents were still there, and I suppose it was my father who

74

arranged this printing.

SMITH: Okay, you are in Rome, you have a Ph.D. of sorts, and a dissertation. What

was your thinking then about what you should do? What were the possibilities open

to you?

KITZINGER: At that time of course there was no Nazi policy in Italy. Mussolini

was very much on the anti-Nazi side at that point, but just the general trade union

laws in this corporate, fascist state made it almost impossible for a foreigner to break

in. Practically the only German refugees who had any kind of a future in Italy were

Catholics who were taken on by the Vatican — there were a few of those. Otherwise it

was really almost impossible. I tried to make a little money by giving German lessons

to an Italian family. These two girls were supposed to learn German and I tried to

teach them, but it was hopeless. Again, it was Hugo Buchthal at that point who

strongly advised me to go to England, to the Warburg Institute, which had moved to

London from Hamburg. While they couldn't possibly help materially all the German

refugee scholars who came to London, there was at least some sort of a base there for

refugees. So after having done what I felt I had to do for the publication of the thesis,

I then went to London, in May of '35.

SMITH: All the time you're basically living off of the inheritance that you mentioned

last time?

KITZINGER: Yes, "inheritance" is a strong word, but the little capital I had, yes,

75

that's what I lived on. And of course I was rapidly using it up. Do you want me to
talk about my beginnings in England?

SMITH: Yes. Did you join the Warburg circle and become a part of that social
milieu?

KITZINGER: Perhaps I should talk for a moment, before we actually get to London,
about the difficulties of entering the country. This is something I still feel quite
strongly about, particularly in these recent years, when more and more of the
Germans of that generation have died and have done sufficiently well in this country
to get obituaries in The Times, or one of the other major papers. This aspect of how
difficult it was for anyone to get into the country is nearly always obscured, and it's
always said that this country welcomed these refugee scholars. Well, it wasn't like
that at all. It was perhaps the case more in the sciences, but in the humanities the first
problem was how to get into the country. I know people who tried two or three
times and were turned back at the frontier.

You had to hide the fact that you were a refugee. I came here to do some
further work on my thesis, for which I needed libraries in London and Oxford, and
one built up this fiction. Of course this is still a problem. Immigration is constantly
discussed in this country. Rather than relying on visas it was up to the immigration
officer at the frontier to either let you in or not let you in, and so you prepared this
story of what you planned to do and why you had to come to this country. In my

76

case this interview took place on the Channel boat, and it was a stormy crossing. It
was another very dicey experience in my life, having to answer these questions. The
man asked me, "How long will it take you to do this work?" I said, "I don't quite
know." Usually you then got a stamp in your passport for six months, but when I
opened my passport there was no time limit. Again, this was one of those things. I
never knew why this happened, but it proved to be very useful because I didn't have
to apply for a renewal or anything.
[Tape IV, Side One]

KITZINGER: My first contacts in England certainly were with the Warburg
[people]. Their first home was in a big office building on Millbank, not far from the
Tate Gallery. At that time it was the only cultural institution in that area, and it was a
totally unsuitable area for anything like the Warburg. One of their main helpers in
getting them to England was Lord Melchett from ICI, the Imperial Chemical
Industries, and this whole office building was owned and I suppose largely occupied
by ICI; they just made one floor available for the library, and that's where the
Warburg Institute was. Fritz Saxl, who was the director, and Gertrud Bing, who was
the assistant director, were both wonderful people. They did what they could, and we
became very good friends, but it was quite clear from the start that they themselves
couldn't possibly be of material help to all these refugee scholars. The best they could
do was to provide introductions and advice.

77

The main source of help for refugee scholars was the Academic Assistance
Council, which had been founded by English scholars to help refugees from Germany.
The person in charge of that was Walter Adams, who was a very remarkable man.
His secretary was Esther Simpson, who is still alive and with whom I maintain
contact. She is a great person and has maintained contact with all her "wards" as she
generally calls them, and a lot of them have made good. Their main function, aside
from trying to give people some sort of subsistence grant, was to find openings
elsewhere, particularly in America. So I registered with them, and from their point of
view I was in a particularly difficult situation because I was so young and hadn't had
any teaching experience. I'd just managed with this emergency Ph.D. to have at least
a piece of paper, but nothing on which to base an application for a job in America.
SMITH: You were twenty-two years old, right, or twenty-three?
KITZINGER: Yes, and most of their people were older, in middle life. Another
foreign student in Munich at the time when I was a student there was Elizabeth
Senior, who was a young English art historian who had gone to Munich because art
history was still a very new subject in England; the Courtauld Institute had been
founded just two or three years before. We got to know each other in Munich, not
terribly well, but I thought I'd call on her. By that time she had become assistant
keeper in the prints and drawings department in the British Museum. So I called on
her, and she was very nice, and very warm-hearted. (Let me interject here that she

78

was killed six years later in a German air raid on London.) She thought that maybe
there was some possibility for me to do some work for a friend of hers in what was
then called the British and Medieval Department of the British Museum, which was in
effect everything from prehistory to eighteenth-century porcelain. It was originally
the antiquities department, from which various things had been split off in the course
of time: Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and so on. What was left was called British and
Medieval.

An assistant keeper there was a man called T. D. Kendrick, whose main
interest had been British prehistory, but he had become very interested in Anglo-
Saxon art, art of the pre-Norman period in England. He had started collecting
material for a corpus of the sculptures that had been made in England, particularly in
the form of stone crosses, from the seventh century on, right into the full Middle
Ages. The market crosses that you see in English towns are the late descendants of
these early Anglo-Saxon crosses. I knew nothing about this. I had never heard of
this before, but Elizabeth Senior thought that Kendrick, being a busy museum official,
could probably do with an assistant, particularly someone who had some knowledge
of this same period on the Continent, because everything here was very insular. If
someone could perhaps spot continental connections for these sculptures, that might
be of great interest.

So Elizabeth arranged an interview with Tom Kendrick, who invited me to

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dinner at the Savile Club. We hit it off right away, and he agreed to take me on as a
volunteer, making it clear, however, from the word go, not to ever expect to get a job
at the British Museum, because the British Museum was civil service, and in order to
enter a civil service position, you had at that time to be British born, so even British
citizenship wouldn't have helped. This changed later, during the war, and they then
had people who were not British born on their regular staff, but at that time it was
absolutely clear that there were no two ways about it. Kendrick was absolutely fair
and honest with me, and I knew that career-wise this was a dead end. But he thought
that having the British Museum connection somewhere in one's record and being able
to use the British Museum letterhead might perhaps be of some help.

I started volunteering within a few weeks of having arrived in England. I
arrived at the end of May and by late June I started working regularly every day at a
desk in an office in the museum. I had a key, which opened the whole library, even
the stacks, which I can't do now when I go to the British Museum. It gave me a
tremendous moral boost — particularly after this Italian experience, where everything
was totally closed — to be on the inside of a major British institution, right from the
start, with very nice people who became very good friends. So that was my
beginning, and it also helped me a lot with the Academic Assistance Council, because
they felt much better about me once I had this status.
SMITH: You were at the British Museum for five years. How did you survive, if

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you were a volunteer?

KITZINGER: From the beginning, Kendrick did whatever he could to get me odd
jobs, and I had a grant from the Academic Assistance Council. They had a standard
minimum grant which was a £150 a year — £12. 10 a month. Today of course this
sounds utterly impossible. But you could just manage on that then if you were very
careful. I first lived in a boarding house, where I think I paid £2 a week for bed and
breakfast, so that took £8 out of the £12. 10 for the month, and the rest went for
eating and whatever. So it was just possible, with this little money that I still had of
my own, and the odd jobs that I was given.

One of them was writing book reviews for the Journal of Hellenic Studies,
where Hellenic studies included Byzantium. The Hellenic Society had a library, and
so received books, some of which they wanted reviewed in their journal. I had a
choice of either getting the book or getting one pound. So I wrote a number of
reviews for them, including Weitzmann's book on ninth- and tenth- century book
illumination, [Die Byzantinische Buchmalerei des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts] and
[Andre] Grabar's L 'Empereur dans Vart byzantin — books that became standard
works. I [chose] one pound, not the book! So that was one of several odd jobs that
came my way.

Another odd job that was handed to me [involved the museums's journal,] the
British Museum Quarterly, which had been started about ten years before I arrived.

1

After the first five years they had published an index to all the articles, and by the time
I appeared on the scene the next five years had gone by, and they wanted another
index. The index for the first five years, believe it or not, was compiled by the
museum's director, Sir George Hill, a great numismatist and historian of Cyprus. It
was felt that he had too many other things to do as director, and here was this young
man who people didn't quite know what to do with, and who needed money. I still
see myself being ushered into the director's office and being told by him how to do
this index for five years of the British Museum Quarterly. I probably got five pounds,
or something like that. So this was the sort of thing I did.

I'm still grateful that I did this, because there were short articles about new
acquisitions in every department, including printed books, because the library at that
time was not separate. I'd never heard about Blake's "Songs of Innocence and
Experience," and there was an article about that because an early manuscript had been
acquired by the museum. So I learned about a lot of things, particularly about English
things, and that was an education. I learned about other departments in the museum
and what they were doing, and I also met a number of people there. So this project,
which was really only meant to give me a little money, [turned out to be] very
educational.

SMITH: I notice that the articles that you wrote in those five years at the museum
cover a broad range of geographic areas; you have Anglo-Saxon, Byzantine,

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Trebizond, Coptic, Romanesque, Syrian —

KITZINGER: Trebizond, for instance, came out of those book reviews for the
Journal of Hellenic Studies — that was [David] Talbot Rice. But Coptic was
something that Kendrick engineered for me. The British Museum had a lot of stone
sculpture from Christian Egypt, partly in the British and Medieval Department and
partly in the Egyptian Department; they'd come with excavation material. Of course
Kendrick eventually became the keeper of the department and ultimately the director
of the museum. Partly because of his feeling of responsibility for this material, which
was mostly in storerooms, and partly because he felt that there may have been some
connection with those Anglo-Saxon sculptures that he was interested in, he got a
wealthy man, Sir Percival David, who was a member of the Sassoon family, to
provide a grant to the Academic Assistance Council specifically for me to go to Egypt
to study Coptic art.

In the spring of 1937 I went to Egypt for two months to do what from the
point of view of the ordinary tourist and also from the point of view of most of the
people there, seemed totally crazy. Instead of looking at pharaonic temples I looked
at these crummy, late sculptures and paintings, with a view to learning something
about their chronology. The object was to classify and label the relevant objects in
the British Museum; it was more or less the kind of approach that I had used for the
Roman paintings. So I traveled up the Nile, and I did go up as far as Aswan, but

83

always with the main focus on Coptic churches, not the great temples and so on.
That [trip] proved to be very interesting and, in a way, productive. I never really
became terribly enamored of Coptic art, but it was a challenging subject.

Perhaps I should mention that by living very economically I was able to
stretch out what was meant to be a two-month stay into three months, having the last
month free for a trip up through Palestine, Syria, and Turkey, ending up in
Constantinople. My main base was in Cairo. There was, and still is, a Coptic
museum there which is a key center for Coptic art. I was going to go by boat from
Alexandria to Haifa, and then to Beirut, and I asked [people] in Cairo, "How much
time should I save at the end before my boat leaves, for Alexandria itself?" I had
arrived there on the way in, but I hadn't stopped [to look at things]. They said, "Oh,
Alexandria? Two days." So I had two days, and I went to the Musee Greco-Romain
and found absolute roomfuls of what turned out to be mostly unpublished material
[representing] the very earliest phase of Coptic [art] — really the antecedents of what I
had seen in Cairo and going up the Nile. There it was. The whole origin of this art
seemed to be embodied in this museum in Alexandria.

I worked very frantically and got as far as I could during those two days. The
main site that had provided this material was Oxyrhynchus, which is well known to
papyrologists because there the main excavations were of ancient papyri. Everybody
talked about Oxyrhynchus papyri, but nobody talked about Oxyrhynchus sculpture.

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So this was perhaps the most important result of my whole stay in Egypt. Then, as I
say, I did go up the eastern rim of the Mediterranean.
SMITH: This was your first visit to Istanbul?
KITZINGER: Yes

SMITH: How long did you stay there then?

KITZINGER: Oh, it must have been about a week I think. It was a month beyond
the time [allotted for the trip], and by that time then I was running out of money.
SMITH: But you're not yet at a position where you could be called a Byzantinist, are
you, quite?

KITZINGER: No. I don't think I should be called a Byzantinist in any case. I never
was really quite that much of a specialist, and certainly not at that point. But I did
have an awareness of the importance of Byzantium, particularly as a conserver of
Greek and antique traditions — the sort of thing that Morey had seen in Alexandria;
that was clear to me. What was going on in Istanbul at that time was an excavation in
the imperial palace that brought to light this extraordinary mosaic floor; which period
it is exactly is still being debated. It's somewhere between the fifth and the seventh
century. It is incredibly Hellenistic — right in the heart of the imperial city. So that
was being excavated then, and this was certainly a revelation to see that, as well as
Thomas Whittemore's work; he was at that point uncovering the mosaics in Hagia
Sophia. I met him there, and this was a very important experience.

85

SMITH: Were the Hagia Sophia murals accessible? Could you see them then?
KITZINGER: They were just being uncovered; the things that are now a regular part
of the tourist thing were only in the process of being uncovered. I had an
introduction to Whittemore, so I did see them.

SMITH: Your first book is Early Medieval Art in the British Museum.
KITZINGER: Well, to bring some sort of order into this, my Coptic experience
resulted in my first public performance in this country, which was a paper read at the
Society of Antiquaries of London, quite soon after my return. It added to one's
prestige to have been allowed to lecture there, and I was of course still very young. I
read a paper on these Coptic sculptures ["Notes on Early Coptic Sculpture"], which
was then published in Archaeologia, which still is the monumental publication of the
Society of Antiquaries. All that really came out of my initial admission to the British
Museum.

Another thing that happened was this work on Anglo-Saxon sculpture, which
proved extremely interesting because there were all these continental connections and
Kendrick needed help on that because it was totally outside his own previous
experience. So we went on trips all over England, he photographing and I making
notes of mostly fragments, mostly in churches, sometimes in museums, so I got to
know England very well. I still feel very familiar, particularly, with the north of
England, because this is where the things were: in Yorkshire, Northumberland,

86

Durham, and on into Scotland. I got to know the northern English countryside on a
very intimate basis, really. The first article I actually published was on vinescroll
ornament on these Anglo-Saxon sculptures. They very clearly had continental roots.
That article was published in a journal called Antiquity, which was semi-dilettantic,
but did have a lot of professional work in it. "Anglo-Saxon Vinescroll Ornament"
was actually my first publication in England. Then came the article on Coptic
sculpture for Archaeologia.

In 1938 Kendrick was asked by the Courtauld Institute to give a course of
lectures on Anglo-Saxon art, which he was deeply involved with by that time; he was
writing a book on early Anglo-Saxon art. I think he felt that in presenting this subject
to his students there should be something of the continental background as well, so he
persuaded the Courtauld Institute to add to his course two lectures by me for the
continental background, which were interspersed with his. He would first introduce
the very earliest things, then I would talk about the continental elements in them.
Then he would go into the ninth and tenth centuries, and I would again give a lecture
on the continental background to that. He then thought that it would be useful to
turn those [lectures] into a little book. But a little book could be published under his
jurisdiction only if it were based on British Museum objects. So I worked these
lectures into a self-contained story of continental art of that period, based on objects
in the British Museum. That then became this little book, Early Medieval Art in the

87

British Museum, which you asked about. So it has a very clear background, and
again partly with a financial aspect, because I got paid for these two lectures.
SMITH: And the book presumably would make you some money as well I suppose?
KITZINGER: Well, no, the book wouldn't because this was written on British
Museum time. I couldn't take any money. By that time another sort of accidental
thing had happened, and that was the Elgin Marbles scandal. The Parthenon
sculptures in the British Museum were [curated by] the Greek and Roman
Department. It emerged in the summer of '38 that the marbles had been subjected to
a rather drastic cleaning process, and there were allegations that they had been
scrubbed with steel brushes, which is certainly not true, but there was a lack of
supervision on the part of the department officials of the work done by technicians.
The result was that the department lost practically all its professional staff.

The keeper, a man called Pryce, was on the point of retirement anyway, and
his clear successor and second in command was Roger [P.] Hinks, who was a very
gifted scholar whose real interest was art history rather than antiquities in the
traditional British Museum sense. Hinks had strong continental connections. He had
been in Germany a lot and had written a book on Carolingian art heavily indebted to
German scholarship. He was close to the Warburg people, and in 1939 he published a
book, under Warburg auspices, on myth and allegory in ancient art. Being primarily a
scholar and writer, he perhaps had neglected somewhat the physical care of the Elgin

88

Marbles, and he was the main victim of this scandal. But it's often said that the
person actually responsible was the man who had been the previous keeper of the
department, E. J. Forsdyke, who had moved on to become the director of the
museum. Anyway, Roger had to go, and as a result there was only one young
assistant keeper, by the name of Martin Robertson, who was the only one left.

There was this [worry about] what would happen when Martin was out to
lunch — who would be there to answer questions if someone from the public came in?
And the idea came up to have me fill in, and at that point I was actually awarded an
annual salary of £150 for sitting in the Greek and Roman Department and dealing
with the public. It was in that capacity and in those conditions that I wrote this book.
I sat in the Greek and Roman Department at a desk, waiting for people to come with
their inquiries, meanwhile writing this book. That's why I never got any pay for it; it
was written on British Museum time.
SMITH: And you still don't get any royalties?

KITZINGER: Well, this book proved a considerable success, particularly in America,
and it came to be used as a sort of textbook in colleges. The result was that the
Indiana University Press bought the copyright for America from the British Museum,
and at that point the British Museum made an arrangement with me whereby I got
some of the royalties that the Indiana Press paid to them. So eventually I did get a
little money out of this. This book must have sold thirty or forty thousand copies

89

over the years. I remember being introduced much later, at a conference in
Providence, Rhode Island, dealing with medieval art, as being "the only one of us
speakers who has written a bestseller." Which was true; it was a bestseller. I was
very embarrassed by it, because as you can see from the whole origin of this, it came
out of a very accidental situation, an introduction to an Anglo-Saxon course
reworked for illustration by British Museum objects, and based on very inadequate
knowledge on my part in some of these areas. I was thoroughly uncomfortable with
this when it became such a success.

It's only in recent years that I have kind of relented on this somewhat, because
I find that art history has changed such a lot, and this visual approach, which is what
this little book is based on, is now so much an endangered species that I think it's
okay. Even though there are a lot of things that were wrong in it that I wouldn't
subscribe to anymore, I don't think it matters so much; what matters is that someone
is asking people to look at the objects.

SMITH: But beyond looking at the objects you're also telling a story. I mean, there
is a clear narrative, which is unusual for many art history texts. And that's also what
makes it readable.

KITZINGER: At the time, the most important aspect of this was that it told a story,
as you say, starting with late antiquity, where the scholars dealing with ancient art
stop, and it led up to the full Middle Ages. To make a continuous story out of that

90

intermediate period had not been done really. But that again was to some extent an
accident, because these Courtauld lectures that it was based on had not gone beyond
the Anglo-Saxon period, meaning the middle of the eleventh century. I wanted to call
this little book Sources of Medieval Art, or Roots of Medieval Art, something like
that. Kendrick took this project, and he had to clear this with Forsdyke, who was the
director.

Forsdyke was a very gruff man, and he said, "What do you mean, 'sources'?
It's got to be the thing itself. You've got to get right into the medieval." So I had to
add the twelfth century, which I hadn't meant to do at all, and call it Early Medieval
Art. That was Forsdyke's doing. So it has a very checkered history, this little book.
But it did have this story, from the third century to the twelfth century, a continuous
thing, and that probably really had not been done before. Hinks's Carolingian book at
least went halfway towards this, because he started in late antiquity and went into the
Carolingian period, but not beyond.

SMITH: Was this a story that was in your mind already, before you began writing the
book, or did it come together as you forced yourself to organize the material?
KITZINGER: I think more the latter, yes, as I forced myself to organize the material.
SMITH: It's clear you set up all these binaries at the beginning, and then there's the
Hegelian twist by having Romanesque become the synthesis of the binaries.
KITZINGER: Well, that couldn't have been planned because, as I say, it was

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Forsdyke who made me add this, [laughter]

SMITH: Right, but it seems very natural. It certainly raised a lot of questions in my

mind as to how Romanesque could be so neatly the synthesis of all these —

KITZINGER: The whole thing is much too neat.

SMITH: Right, but to what degree is that kind of binary-synthesis methodology a

reflection of the training you received at Munich?

KITZINGER: I suppose in a sense it was still Pinder's idea of generations. There's

this dialectical aspect which I applied to this much longer span of years. I suppose

you could say that came into it.

SMITH: Let's see how to rephrase this question. What I'm getting at has to do with

intentions which may or may not be clear in the texts themselves. Is unfolding a

narrative an important part of your approach to the subject matter? To be able to say,

at least for yourself, "Okay, this is where we begin and this is where we end, and this

is how the end grows logically from the development."

KITZINGER: Yes. When I span centuries I do want to spin this narrative, but on

the whole, in my life's work, I've been much happier with monographic studies.

SMITH; Right. Well, let's take the mosaics of the Cappella Palatina. That essay

["The Mosaics of the Cappela Palatina in Palermo"] is not structured as a narrative,

but it seems to me there is an underlying narrative of a political ideology that's being

developed under Roger II and his successor that then is a factor in explaining changes

92

in the mosaics.

KITZINGER: I think a later book that is on those lines is Byzantine Art in the
Making. It is very much in the same spirit as Early Medieval Art . With that kind of
writing there is far greater danger of distorting things. The thing that attracts me
about dealing with a single monument like the Cappella Palatina is that there you can
make your connections with the contemporary history — personalities, patronage,
everything — much more concrete and much more plausible than you can when you
span centuries. I always feel, particularly with Early Medieval Art, but also with
Byzantine Art in the Making, that the public laps up syntheses like these no matter
how poor they may be in detail, because it enables them to take several centuries
home in their pocket. I feel much more comfortable with monographic studies, and
the Cappella Palatina is such a case. Saint Cuthbert's coffin ["The Coffin of Saint
Cuthbert"] is another. This was a £10 proposition that Kendrick steered my way. In
the late thirties, the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral had a very active, very
enterprising chapter clerk, a man called Christopher [F] Battiscombe.
[Tape IV, Side Two]

KITZINGER: Saint Cuthbert, who was bishop and abbot on the island of
Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumberland, died in 687 A. D. His relics soon
started working miracles, and in 698 he was reburied in a wooden coffin with a lot of
gifts — a portable silver altar, a pectoral cross and so on. These relics, which ended up

93

in Durham, had been rather neglected. After having been in a very splendid shrine in
the cathedral, they had been buried underground during the Reformation. They were
not reexcavated until the early nineteenth century and had been lying in vitrines in the
Chapter library. Battiscombe decided to do something about this. Textiles were a
very important aspect of this, and he engaged professionals to physically care for
them and scholars to study them.

One object that needed studying was the coffin, which had incised figures and
inscriptions. This was something that could be made a separate subject, and the [job
was] was given to me. I was offered £10 for writing up the carvings on Saint
Cuthbert's coffin. This turned out to be an extremely interesting subject, which then
occupied me off and on for a number of years. It was really the first case where I
became equally concerned with content, iconography, and style, but within a single
object, and this I found fascinating and challenging — the two aspects threw light on
each other. I still think it's one of the most satisfactory things I've done — that and the
Cappella Palatina too. This is why I'm raising that connection — these monographic
studies of single objects which have ramifications, where it goes from the inside out
rather than presenting a broad sweep.

SMITH: As you are working in London, you're obviously interacting with British
intellectuals at the British Museum. Were you also interacting with the German exile
community at the Warburg?

94

KITZINGER: Yes, oh yes. I went to their lectures. I remember Edgar Wind giving
his course of lectures on the Sistine Chapel, which was his great interest at that time.
It was a very small group, mostly Germans. Wind's English was absolutely perfect,
and as Panofsky used to say, "Ist's der Vortrag geh zu Wind." He was a great
lecturer, and absolutely fluent for the whole hour. I've never forgotten these lectures
on the Sistine Chapel. Most of what he said has not stood the test of time, but it was
very stimulating and very interesting.

The Warburg had lectures for which they tried to get famous people so as to
attract an audience to this remote place on Millbank. I remember T. S. Eliot, for
instance, came to lecture. I was surprised that he did that because he was anti-
Semitic. Jacques Maritain was another lecturer. His lecture was actually printed
later in the first volume of the Warburg journal. But it was always very hard to get an
audience. I will always remember, particularly in winter, we would jokingly talk of
offering people a shilling if they would come in from the street, if they wanted to get
warm and sit in on the lectures, so at least we would have a larger audience,
[laughter] It took a long time for the London scholarly public to become involved
with the Warburg. There were people like Hinks, who took to the Warburg right
away. Kendrick I don't think did; it was still too foreign a thing for him.
SMITH: The stereotype is that there's this disjunction between the German
theoretical approach and the British antiquarian [approach], and of course being at the

95

British Museum you were [aware of this]

KITZINGER: I was right in the middle. I don't think of those years in the British

Museum as particularly fruitful intellectually. I got a lot out of it because I got to

handle material and I became involved with objects to a very intense degree, but

intellectually, no.

SMITH: So the British tradition didn't have concepts or methodologies that were

very meaningful to you?

KITZINGER: No. The Courtauld Institute, in a way, had been founded with the idea

of adopting something of the continental approach, and my lecturing there gave me

the feeling that I was helping that along, but I was not getting [ideas] from there.

SMITH: But at the same time the Warburg represents a tradition of German thought

that was very different from what you had [experienced]

KITZINGER: Yes, but I suppose I was just too busy with keeping body and soul

together. I can't say that I really got deeply involved with Warburgian ideas during

those years. Yes, I learned something about this listening to lectures by people like

Wind and Saxl, but I didn't really at that time come to grips with the Warburgian

[approach]. I think this problem of linking art to ideas, history, I didn't come to grips

with until after I got to America. I got to know Panofsky then, though I had met him

in London when he came to visit. One person who was important later in America

was Albert [M] Friend, who had himself absorbed some Warburgian [notions]. I had

96

considerable contact with him in Dumbarton Oaks.

SMITH: Well, we'll get to that in another session. You were close to Hugo Buchthal

at this time?

KITZINGER: Yes. As I say, we were trying to do this [study] that came out of our

common interest in Byzantium. A family in Gloucestershire was trying to do

something for refugees, and they invited Buchthal and me to spend two or three

weeks there, to have a quiet time to work this out, and we didn't; it was never

published.

SMITH: Did you meet Otto Kurz at this time?

KITZINGER: Kurz and [Ernst H] Gombrich were sent to the Warburg from Austria

by their teacher, [Julius] von Schlosser, who wanted to get them out of Austria when

he saw what was coming. Gombrich became a good friend. I got to know Kurz, and

he was always a great source of information, although we didn't really become

personal friends. But Gombrich, yes, we became personal friends.

SMITH: I've been told by other people that you could mention almost any subject to

Kurz and he would immediately come up with a half-dozen references.

KITZINGER: Yes, it was quite incredible. He was a very kind person, too, but we

didn't particularly take to each other, personally. There was also a problem with his

wife, who was interested in migration-period art, and she and I didn't agree on certain

things that I became involved with in my work. She then became ill, and it was a bit

97

sad. We were always on very good terms, but we didn't become personal friends.

I mentioned during the last session that Kurz knew Russian. At that point, if I
had a problem in Russian I asked him, or I asked Roger Hinks, who also had learned
Russian. So I had two colleagues who were able to help me.
SMITH: Were you learning Russian at this time?

KITZINGER: No, this came out of my Australian experience, which I haven't talked
about. That was a wartime thing.

SMITH: What about Otto Demus. Did you meet him at this time?
KITZINGER: No, I didn't meet him until the summer of '39, at the Warburg. It was
through Demus that I met my wife [Margaret Susan Theobald]. Demus had a friend
who came with him from Austria, who was taken in at a house by a small group of
girls, one of whom was my wife's sister. They gave a party, and that's where we met.
SMITH: On £12. 10 a month, how much of a social life could you have at this time?
What kind of social life did young men and women who were well educated but poor
engage in, in London?

KITZINGER: Well, one did go to theaters. Kendrick and Elizabeth Senior, too,
were great movie goers, and they quite often took me along. I suppose they paid, I
can't remember now, but I saw a lot of movies during those years. Kendrick was very
fond of pantomime — the Christmas theater in England. So I learned all that. Then
there was someone I haven't mentioned. The deputy keeper of the department was a

98

man called [Alec Bain] Tonnochy, a Scotsman, who was an absolute enthusiast for

Gilbert and Sullivan. He played the piano and he sang all the Gilbert and Sullivan

songs for me. Of course there were other German refugees who had come from

Munich, as I did. My best friend from Munich was a man called Harold Ballin, who

had settled in London right away, in '33. By the time I arrived, in '35, he was already

quite settled. I also had cousins there. So I had a lot of social life. I wasn't lacking

that, and most of it didn't cost money.

SMITH: Did you consider yourself to have modern tastes in art and music and

literature?

KITZINGER: Not really, no. Nor did I really keep up very well. I read now about

artists who became prominent and who first exhibited, say, in the mid or late thirties

in London, [and I think,] "If only I'd seen that." It was, however, partly material

pressure; one was under terrible pressure. I don't want to make this an excuse, but I

can't say that I was keeping up with trends.

SMITH: In Germany, what was your relation, if any, to the Stefan George

phenomenon?

KITZINGER: That's an interesting question. In my parents' library there were some

of the George volumes; I still see them with their fancy getup. Not that my parents

were particularly [involved], but this was apparently a thing to own. My great

adolescent experience in the field of poetry was Rilke, and I always felt and still feel

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that they were somehow mutually exclusive. Why I took to Rilke and not to George,
I don't know, but two people whom I very much admired were great George fans.
One was Gerhart Ladner. He was an Austrian. He died last year in California. He
had first done a degree in history, and then one in art history with Schlosser in
Vienna. He wrote a monumental article on eleventh-century painting in Rome, which
I had read. It came out in Vienna in '34, 1 suppose. That was quite an important
influence on me because it was dealing with the same kind of thing that my thesis was
about, only a different period. I met him, and he turned out to be a George
[follower]. After he died, a slim volume of memories was published, in which he talks
a lot about George.

The other, much more "Georgian" man was of course Ernst Kantorowicz,
who really had belonged to George's inner circle. I got to know him quite well in
America. So those were my two chief indirect contacts with George. Both were
people whom I very much admired, but I was not involved with that part of their
interests. For me, Rilke has remained a source of comfort and inspiration all my life.
SMITH: What was your knowledge of, or your interest in, Freudian or Jungian
psychoanalytic theory?

KITZINGER: None. Psychoanalysis was something one knew of, and it was being
undergone by people who were in real trouble; it was something, really, to stay away
from. I knew of it very much as a therapeutic thing, rather than as a general

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psychological theory. I had no contact with it, aside from reading things like Totem

and Taboo, and other Freudian books and articles that had to do with culture.

SMITH: Did that book make sense to you?

KITZINGER: Well, up to a point, but the famous thing on Leonardo never made

sense and still doesn't. Freud as an art historian I do not particularly appreciate, but

his general ideas on culture, yes.

SMITH: So Freudian terminology was not bandied about.

KITZINGER: Well yes, I mean it was in the air, certainly — the subconscious, and

complexes, and all that. Anybody could use those terms without having read a line of

Freud.

SMITH: What about Jungian theory, which of course after the war becomes very

much involved with certain aspects of cultural analysis. Was there consideration of

Jung's book on alchemy?

KITZINGER: No, let's see. How did I come across Jung? Archetypes — as a

concept, without necessarily having read much. Although one could see the

Eucharist, which of course did and still does concern me a lot in my work, in Jungian

terms; you know, eating the god and so on. Things like that did enter my own sphere,

but without my ever having really dealt with Jung. Is that a satisfactory answer?

SMITH: I was just wondering to what degree you or others were talking about this;

to what degree the concepts were taking on a solidity. One often reads that

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particularly Freudian, or later Jungian concepts become central to certain kinds of

analyses.

KITZINGER: Well, I can't say, consciously at least, that either Freud or Jung's

concepts did. Warburg's ideas, yes, to some extent. Pathosformel became a very

important concept. I remember talking with Gombrich a lot about that in the

thirties — Warburg's idea of an atlas of gestures.

SMITH: Gombrich of course becomes popularly famous because of his Art and

Illusion, and its relationship to Gestalt psychology —

KITZINGER: Which he would reject.

SMITH: Yes, but nonetheless it's Gestalt. Was that something of interest at the time,

or is that a later development?

KITZINGER: Gombrich gave his Art and Illusion lectures in Washington when I

was there, and this was a great event. One realized at the time this was kind of a

breakthrough. I attended every one of these Sunday afternoon lectures at the

National Gallery; it was certainly an intellectual event. But to what extent it entered

my own [work] . . . well, some of Gombrich's ideas have, yes. I've quoted him quite a

number of times.

SMITH: Were you aware of the work that Rudolf Arnheim and [Anton] Ehrenzweig

were doing, or Ernst Kris?

KITZINGER: Kris I heard of through Gombrich, because they had been closely

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associated. I read their book on caricatures, and Kris's article on the portrait
sculptures of F. X. Messerschmidt, but that seemed to me a rather risky
business — psychoanalyzing back via the works of art left by an individual. That
seemed to me very dangerous. As I say, I found problems with Freud's view of
Leonardo. I was aware of Kris, yes, but Ehrenzweig, no.
SMITH: AndArnheim?

KITZINGER: Arnheim of course I met because he taught at Harvard, later. My wife
went to his lectures and argued with him a lot. He came to our house too, and we
argued with him because he imposed on one a certain way of seeing things ... I
suppose I emerge very much as a positivist from all this, just sticking to my objects.
SMITH: Is that how you view yourself, as a positivist?
KITZINGER: Yes.

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SESSION THREE: 24 FEBRUARY, 1995
[Tape V, Side One]

SMITH: Did you have any further thoughts from yesterday?

KITZINGER: Yes. In enumerating these various odd jobs and things that the British
Museum got me involved with in order to earn money, there was one I forgot. The
British and Medieval Department had what was called the mounting fund — under the
discretion of the keeper — for getting equipment for the mounting of objects. At that
time Perspex was a very new and modern museum material for showcases, so there
was this fund that was meant for that, and I think it was about £100 a year. In order
to exhibit an object on a mount you also have to have a label, and in order to do a
label you have to do research in order to decide what to put on that label. Under that
heading Kendrick made money from the mounting fund available for me.

The British Museum had a lot of material from the late antique and early
Christian period scattered in different departments, and the idea was to have an Early
Christian Room. My job, from about the middle of 1938 on, was to rearrange all this
material and to organize a room for it. This took quite a lot of my time, and then it
was followed by my being made to sit in the Greek and Roman department writing
the book on early medieval art. A lot of the work for the Early Christian Room
consisted in directing the technicians and the staff to create the right mounts and
things, but I also had to do research on the objects in order to write the labels.

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The thing I really want to point out about this is that the work on this Early
Christian Room was finished in August of '39, and it stayed together for about two
weeks before the dismantling of the whole museum started. So, looking back on my
life, it was a case where I made a tremendous effort, only for it to collapse
immediately after its completion. But another thing happened then in '39. Does the
Sutton Hoo ship burial mean anything to you?
SMITH: Oh, yes.

KITZINGER: It was a great good fortune to be in on this. The excavation wasn't
conducted by the museum, but the museum became very much involved in it. These
objects, excavated on a site in Suffolk, were brought to the museum gradually for
treatment, for cleaning and so on. This excavation really reached its climax in August
'39, when one didn't know from one day to the next when the first bombs would drop.
In the end these trucks arrived in the evening from Suffolk with the objects no longer
excavated but still encased in lumps of earth, and the actual uncovering was then done
in the museum.

For Kendrick the most important things were the gold objects that [were
unearthed] — this amazing inlaid jewelry. For me the most important things were the
silver objects, including a large Byzantine silver dish with Byzantine control marks on
it. So this was a very exciting part of this altogether very turbulent year. Leica
photographs were taken of the objects and then they spent all of the war years in an

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unused tube station in London. Proper study of them began after the war. But with
the help of the photographs, during the first winter, '39 to '40, those of us who were
experts in one aspect or the other worked on them and did research on them.
The main job during that winter, '39 to '40, was the packing up of the
museum — the biggest packing job in history, I suppose. It was enormous, what was
done. I always cite that as a sidelight on the developments around the time of the
Munich agreement, in '38 and the year following. If war had broken out as it might
well have done, in the fall of '38, the museum would have been totally unprepared.
When the war did actually break out, at the end of August, in '39, preparations had
been made to the extent, for instance, that the Office of Works already had masses
and masses of packing cases ready; they were all flat, but on hinges, so that it only
took a minute to make them into a case. There were stacks and stacks of these cases,
which I'm sure were prepared during that year. So that's just one small example of
how that one year, with all the debate over the Munich agreement, was actually used
in Britain for preparations.

SMITH: What were your personal feelings during that whole period of negotiation,
with Chamberlain in Munich?

KITZINGER: Oh, that was terrible. I was absolutely appalled. Of course the
refugees had a much clearer understanding of what the whole Hitler business was
about than people in England. I remember one official in the central administration of

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the British Museum whom I got to know a little, a really nice English gentleman of
the old school. He had spent a student year in Heidelberg, and he had this romantic
recollection of Germany as of 1910. When it became clear that the museum had to
make preparations for blackouts, and of course with all the glass roofs this was a
major undertaking, he said, "Surely not the great British Museum!" His idea was that
the Germans would respect the British Museum in bombing London — that kind of
thing.

But in their turn, the refugees were accused of scare mongering, which they
were, up to a point, that's true. Certainly when any of us had a chance, we tried to
make clear to people what the [Nazis] were about. So one certainly was involved. I
remember the youngest recruit to the department at that time was Rupert [Lee Scott]
Bruce-Mitford, who died two years ago. He did a big publication on Sutton Hoo
after the war, but he was then quite a new member of the staff. I got to know him a
little, we worked in the same office. I remember him saying, when Chamberlain came
back from Munich, "For the first time in my life I am ashamed of being British." And
he was not left wing, not at all; he was very much a middle-of-the-road kind of
person. So there you have a case of someone who was aware, but a lot of people
weren't.

SMITH: You expected war to break out?
KITZINGER: Yes, in Munich it was touch and go in September '38. Then of course

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the other thing that happened that affected me personally very much was the

Kristallnacht, the pogrom, so that whole period is just full of drama.

SMITH: What were your personal goals at this time? Did you want to stay in the

British Museum, or did you want to teach?

KITZINGER: No, I think I told you that it was quite clear that I had no future in the

museum, but with this work on the Early Christian Room, I was becoming something

of a museum man, you know, primarily concerned with the display of objects and so

on. But I didn't really have any long-term goals. I always thought that sooner or later

I would end up in America, teaching.

SMITH: I also wanted to ask you about Edgar Wind. Did you get to know him?

KITZINGER: Yes, the only time I knew him quite well was during those years when

he was giving those informal talks on Michelangelo.

SMITH: He was supposed to have been a stupendous lecturer, but it's clear from

people I've talked to that the Warburg people related to him as if he were Lucifer

himself, and I wonder if you have any insights on this.

KITZINGER: I haven't really. To me the Warburg people, when I first met them, in

'35 or so, were a very homogeneous group of which Wind was one. One realized in

the course of time that there were internal disagreements, but I never really became

involved in this or knew much about it. There you really have to ask other people,

like Buchthal, who knew much more about it.

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SMITH: I thought maybe you, as someone who was somewhat on the outside, might

have perspectives.

KITZINGER: No, except one felt Wind wasn't really quite part of this group, which

then became much clearer when he went to America.

SMITH: So the war breaks out in '39. You were still a German citizen at this time?

KITZINGER: I had a German passport, yes. You could only apply for naturalization

after five years of residence. My five years were up in the spring of 1940 and I made

my application, but one knew then, doing that, that it was pointless, because they

weren't processing any applications during the war. Certainly not for people who

were German.

SMITH: So you were an enemy alien at this time?

KITZINGER: Well, the government instituted a system of tribunals for refugees,

which everybody went through. It must have been in the early months of 1940,

during the period of the so-called "phoney war." That was the thing about that

winter; everybody had expected that bombs would drop the moment that war was

declared, and nothing happened. These tribunals were established which put you into

one of three categories: A, B, C. A were real suspects. B were people one didn't

quite know about, and C were labeled victims of Nazi oppression, who were clearly

bona fide refugees. Practically everyone I knew was C, including myself. I don't

really remember the details of these tribunals, but I think it was a half-hour interview

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with someone. So one felt quite clear that although one was pro forma still a German
national, one was a refugee from Nazi oppression.

Then this whole system collapsed with the fall of France, in June of 1940.
They started interning people in the B category, where they weren't quite sure. And
then it was only a question of two or three weeks, I suppose, during which it became
quite clear they were interning everyone of German origin. One knew then that this
was coming; it was just a question of days or weeks. So I was visited by these very
polite, apologetic policemen one morning in my room in Kensington, in late June of
1940. I was taken to the police station and then to an improvised camp on a race
course, in Lingfield, Surrey. Already at the police station you met a lot of people like
yourself who had been rounded up that morning. Obviously the camp was not
permanent; it was a makeshift thing, but one knew that the people who had been
interned earlier were on the Isle of Man, mostly.

You have to realize, France had just fallen, and of course what caused this
scare over fifth-column infiltration was the imminent possibility of the invasion of
England. Here we were, really very close to the south coast, prisoners in effect,
totally exposed to this. One realized if the Germans did land there, we would be the
first victims. So this was a very uncomfortable thing, but then we were gradually
evacuated from this camp. I remember the train journey, and it was very weird
because by that time all the signs had been taken off stations — again, because of fear

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of invasion — so that enemy troops wouldn't know where they were. So we were
taken on this long train ride, and we only had to guess by the state of the sun which
direction we were going. We ended up in Liverpool and were taken to a boat, which
we thought was rather big just to go to the Isle of Man. It was only after we had
been on this boat for about forty-eight hours and it had started sailing that we knew
we were going to Australia.

This shipment overseas of refugees became a major issue. One boat that went
to Canada was sunk by U-boats, and about two thousand refugees lost their lives; that
was the Arandora Star. I think one already knew about that when I was taken on this
boat. Our boat was called the Dunera and that also was a famous case because we
were very badly treated. This was a troop ship that had just taken part in the
evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk. After the collapse of France the British
army gathered at the Channel ports, and the main one was Dunkirk. From there a lot
of small boats were going back and forth, bringing as many British troops back to
Britain as possible. The Dunera was a larger boat that had taken part in this, and
within two weeks after that it was reoriented to take these Germans to Australia.

The troops and the crew, having gone through this very hard experience of the
evacuation from Dunkirk, resented having to take these Germans to Australia. They
had no way of knowing who we were, so they were full of resentment and treated us
very badly. On this ship there was a group of genuine Nazi prisoners of war, and

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Italian prisoners too. While we tried to impress on the commanding officers the fact
that we were something quite different, nobody really quite believed us. We were
separated from the Nazis though; we never actually had any contact with them. But
the general feeling was that if the government went to the trouble of sacrificing
valuable shipping space for transporting people, there must be something wrong with
the people — they must have done something. So we were under suspicion right from
the beginning. There was a total division between the police, who had just acted
under government [orders], and these army people.

The Dunera became famous, and a number of books have been written about
this whole story. Churchill was prime minister by that time, and when he was told
about the fifth-column activities that had taken place in France and Belgium, he was
worried about possible fifth columns in England, and he said, "Collar the lot!" One of
the books that has been written about this internment of aliens is actually called
Collar the Lot! My name figures in some of these books.

Of course one's friends did what they could to try to get one released. The
Warburg had quite a number of people in the same situation. At the British Museum I
was the only one. This trip to Australia took almost two months, from the end of
June to the end of August. When we arrived in this camp, which was in the desert
north of Sydney, New South Wales, the first message that I received was a telegram
from the Warburg saying that they had secured my release. In this camp there were a

112

thousand people, and I think I was the first one to get a release. In the course of time
more people got these releases, because a lot of people in England were trying to help
them.

The Australians said, "That has nothing to do with us. We only undertook to
keep you people in safe places. You can only be released in England." Well, the
result of this was that I spent nine months in that camp. By the spring of 1941 there
were about fifty of us who were in the same position. Gradually more and more
people had received these official releases, which were meaningless. It wasn't till the
summer of '4 1 that room was found for us on a ship, called the Themistocles, that was
taking Australian lumbermen to England to replace British lumbermen who had gone
into the fighting forces.

I think I've said enough now about it, except for one thing that was relevant to
my subsequent work. One of the first people I met at this police station in
Kensington, where I was taken, was a young man who had been a student at
Cambridge. His name was Alec Herz, and he had studied Russian; that was his
subject at Cambridge. In my work in the preceding years, I had always been very
much aware of the need to know some Russian, so Alec gave me private lessons in
Russian. At first we had no books, nothing, but in the course of time, via the Red
Cross and other agencies that tried to help these internees, we [were able to get] a
grammar, and some reading material, so I learned Russian there. This proved a great

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help all the rest of my life. I never tried to tackle a Dostoyevsky novel or anything
like that, but late Tolstoy — his "Simple Tales for Simple Folk," that kind of thing I
could read and still can read. But I only [learned Russian] in order to read my
professional literature.
SMITH: So you're back in England.

KITZINGER: I'm back in England in the Summer of '41 . Friends in America also
tried to help, especially Richard and Trude Krautheimer. They got in touch with
Wilhelm Koehler, who was professor of fine arts at Harvard and a prominent
medievalist to whom I had sent offprints previously. He knew my dissertation and my
work. It so happened that in the fall of 1940, Dumbarton Oaks had been handed by
Mr. and Mrs. [Robert Woods] Bliss to Harvard as an institution for research,
essentially in Byzantine art — an extraordinary coincidence. The key person at
Harvard was Paul Sachs, who was actually the second director of the Fogg [Art]
Museum — the first one was Edward [Waldo] Forbes, but the two worked very closely
together. Sachs was the man who steered the Blisses quite a lot in preparing their
gift.

So 1940-41 was the first year that Dumbarton Oaks was a Harvard
institution, and they instituted fellowships for young people. Koehler was able, via
Paul Sachs, to secure for me one of these fellowships. I still have the letter addressed
to me in the camp in Australia. Everybody thought, having this appointment [waiting

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for me], they would let me go from Australia to America, but the Australians would
only send you back to England. So I arrived back in London in August of 1941, and
the first thing I did was go to the American embassy and apply for a visa to go to
Washington. This was a one-year fellowship, and I thought I was just going for a
year. One problem there was shipping. Shipping for anyone who wasn't in the army
was a problem all through the war. It was only because people realized that I had
been rather badly treated that they found space for me on a Norwegian freighter that
took about twelve passengers. They were all hand-picked people who were going to
America for a particular purpose of interest to Britain. This was the only way
civilians could go at all.

I was already familiar with the convoy system, which was very impressive — to
have these twenty-five or thirty ships, mostly freighters, with an escort of destroyers.
Our ship had made the trip across the Pacific back from Australia alone, and had gone
through the Panama Canal and up the east coast of North America to Halifax. But
from there on it was a convoy. So I had already done this, but on that earlier
crossing, from Halifax to Liverpool, our dear old Themistocles was such an old boat
that it couldn't keep up with the others and one morning we found ourselves all alone
in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
SMITH: With German submarines everywhere.
KITZINGER: That was pretty scary. By contrast, this Norwegian freighter was very

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modern, and it was a much smaller boat. The captain didn't believe in convoys, and
after about two days it was very rough weather, and I think he purposely lost his
place in the convoy in this storm. From there on, we zig-zagged across the northern
Atlantic for three weeks. During that time Pearl Harbor happened, so while I was
leaving England to go to a neutral America, I arrived in an America that had gone to
war. As far as passports were concerned, I still had a German passport when I was
sent to Australia. I can't remember whether I lost it or destroyed it; anyway, I didn't
want to have a German passport. In order to make this trip to America, I was given a
kind of Nansen passport, a stateless paper from the Home Office, and at that point
everybody was being very helpful. I should mention that during the period of the
phoney war, aside from applying uselessly for British citizenship, one also tried to get
some sort of a job to help in the war effort. That was very much an activity all of us
engaged in in order to try to help, but of course once this mistrust had developed this
was quite hopeless.

So I made the trip to the States, with this stateless paper, and arrived with
eleven other passengers on this freighter. They all were let off except me. We
arrived in Manhattan in the late evening, and I still remember spending an eerie night
alone on the ship, with everybody else having gone on shore. The next morning a
policeman or someone took me over to Ellis Island, which was a very strange
experience because it was full of people who had been rounded up in New York. We

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arrived I think on the twelfth of December, five days after Pearl Harbor. I must say
I've always given the U.S. authorities great credit for the very limited number of
people whom they rounded up. I think they must have on the whole got the right
people. But it meant that here I was among all these people who were real suspects.
I realized I couldn't talk to any of these people; they were rounded up because there
were good reasons for rounding them up. I think this was a Friday, and nothing
happened during the weekend.

One thing that was allowed was to make a telephone call, and I called
Dumbarton Oaks. Of course I didn't know anyone there, but I had at least that
correspondence, and I wanted them to know where I was. Then I was summoned at
the beginning of the following week to a room where two or three police officers sat.
They started questioning me, and I gave them my story. I remember the key
question: "Are you a German?" I said, "No, I'm stateless." That didn't satisfy them,
and finally I had to swear that I was born in Germany. I couldn't deny that. Anyway,
this was a very uncomfortable, very difficult thing, but they let me go, on condition
that I went straight to Washington. I was not even to go into New York City. I
disobeyed, I did go into New York City — I didn't know how else to proceed — and
then came to Washington. So my arrival in America was not auspicious.

But when you think what a shock Pearl Harbor was, the restrained way in
which the American authorities reacted was really quite remarkable. So far as I know

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they made very few mistakes, and there wasn't any major sabotage or fifth-column
activity, so far as I know, all through the war. Of course with the Japanese,
afterwards, this became a very different thing — these mass internments, which caused
an enormous amount of protest. That was a very different thing on the West Coast.
But in '41 they did extremely well. Of course they also almost immediately started
making use of the refugee potential as a resource for intelligence.

Anyway, I arrived in Dumbarton Oaks, in this extraordinary luxury. Have you
been there?

SMITH: No I haven't, actually.

KITZINGER: It's a fabulous estate, and at that time it still had flunkys in livery from
the Bliss era at the gate, and so on. Coming from this preceding year and a half,
Britain at war, Australia, Ellis Island and so on, this was really quite incredible, what I
found myself in the middle of.

SMITH: Did they provide you with lodging on the estate?

KITZINGER: Yes. There is a smaller building, about a minute's walk from the main
mansion, but still within the grounds — the grounds are enormous — which had been a
workshop and book bindery. By the time I arrived it had been turned into a Fellows
Building, which has about eight single rooms and two two-room apartments. So I
had one of these rooms.
SMITH: What were your expectations of Dumbarton Oaks and what were their

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expectations of you? Were things just going to proceed, regardless of the war?
KITZINGER: Yes. Certainly during that first winter of the war (1941-42) they
were.

[Tape V, Side Two]

KITZINGER: Harvard had thought that they would get a group of young
postdoctoral people who were interested in Byzantium, particularly Byzantine art, to
spend a year doing their own research. During Harvard's first year, 1940-41, Morey
had gone from Princeton to Washington to supervise the first lot of young people,
and Henri Focillon was there. Focillon was a great friend of the Blisses, so Morey
and Focillon were the senior scholars in residence during that first year. They had a
small group of mostly young women who were students of Morey's. Alison Frantz,
who had just died, was one of the first-year fellows.

Then in the second year, Morey had gone back to Princeton and Focillon was
by that time quite ill. Wilhelm Koehler was sent by Harvard to be in charge, as a
senior fellow, and with him Robert Blake, who was a philologist with all these eastern
languages, especially Armenian and Georgian. He was a very learned man, interested
in the early translations of the Bible into these languages. So Koehler and Blake were
the senior fellows, but really the dominant figure there, and the one who really got
things going, was Koehler. He was an art historian, and the whole [institution] was
built around the collection of art objects that the Blisses had, and their library, which

119

at that time was still rather small. But the whole thing was centered on art and art
history.

Koehler instituted the Archives Project, which was in effect an attempt to
gather, systematically, information on excavated sites and materials in every
Mediterranean country that became part of the Byzantine empire. The idea was to
get away from what Koehler called "roving objects," meaning the odd ivory, the odd
manuscript that had survived and no one knew where they came from. With the
excavated material you knew at least where it was, and very often you had pretty
precise ideas about the dates. So each one of the fellows was expected to spend half
his or her time on the region allotted to him or her, to gather systematically the very
large amount of information in periodicals and in excavation reports, which in general
wasn't being used because it was too scattered. This was a very good idea, and to me
it made perfect sense, because I had spent, particularly in my museum years, all my
time on "roving objects," and here I was going to get onto solid ground. One always
heard arguments: is this from Egypt or is it from Syria? Here, at least with excavated
objects, that was something that you would know.

The region that I was assigned was the Balkans, and particularly Yugoslavia.
During the same year other people were working on Asia Minor, Turkey, Syria, and
Palestine. I'm not sure anyone was working on Egypt in that year. Anyway, it was a
very intelligently conceived effort at making usable material that really hadn't been

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used.

SMITH: So you were relying on published reports?

KITZINGER: Yes, entirely. Of course by the time this [project] got underway, with
the war situation one knew that you wouldn't be able to visit these sites for quite
some time, but it didn't really matter, because anyone going on a site and exploring it
ought to have all the material that had previously been found there anyway. So it
made perfect sense, and this system had been worked out, essentially by Koehler
himself, together with the young people around him, of systematically recording
according to a certain outline the information on every site: the history of its
excavation, the layout, the architecture, the inscriptions, and any feature of
decoration, which in my case proved to be the most important thing, namely, floor
mosaics. I had been vaguely acquainted with floor mosaics, particularly in Ravenna
and Aquileia, but here was an opportunity to really gather that material. You could
associate the artistic developments within that medium with a particular region and
with a time sequence.

There were very interesting stylistic developments [in floor mosaics] from the
third, fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, which you could follow within that one region.
At the same time, [there were] iconographic [considerations] in that most of these
floors, or at least a great many of them came from churches. What do you do if you
want to have subject matter on a floor in a church, where it gets trodden on? That

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limits the amount of strictly religious subject matter that you can use, and on the other
hand it is a challenge to use nonreligious subjects that still are meaningful in a
religious context. So floor mosaics had curious limitations and opportunities for the
artist or designer at the time. It is a fascinating field, with which I then became deeply
involved and still am. I'm still collecting the material, anything that I can find, and it's
enormously rich.

I ought to say that the major impetus for such a study at that time was the
Princeton excavation in Antioch. They hadn't expected to find these masses of floor
mosaics there, which dated from the second and subsequent centuries in an almost
entirely secular context. By the time I got involved with this material, the Antioch
mosaics had become a thing of major interest to anyone working in the late antique,
early Christian, or early Byzantine field. It was very much Morey's doing that this
exploration got going, but Koehler made it a systematic study, going all around the
Mediterranean.

SMITH: And you would gather together regularly to share your information?
KITZINGER: Yes, we had a weekly gathering where you exchanged your
information. You were supposed to work on this for half of the day, and the other
half you would do your own work.

SMITH: Did this mean going to the Library of Congress to find the excavation
reports?

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KITZINGER: Yes. Of course Dumbarton Oaks had a library, but you relied a lot on
the Library of Congress. Dumbarton Oaks had borrowing privileges there, which was
great, because it was otherwise limited to congressmen. We had a bi-weekly
messenger service by which you got your books, so you wrote out your cards and the
books arrived at your desk. Without that, it couldn't have been done. For my
particular area, Yugoslavia, my Russian came in [handy]. I didn't have a word of
Serbo-Croatian, but with the Russian as a base I was able pretty quickly to manage
these excavation reports, which is what they mainly were. I have trouble now with
anything Serbo-Croatian, but at that time, within a few months, I was able to handle
this material.

SMITH: That sounds like an excellent project to have been involved with.
KITZINGER: In talking with you I am constantly tempted to leap ahead into the
future, but I think I'm really the only person who got something permanently out of
the Archives Project. For most of these young Americans it was an impediment,
because they had gone to Dumbarton Oaks to do their own work, and instead they
were made to do this. Unless they happened to find something that interested them in
the work, it was just a chore.

The whole thing, in retrospect, was based on a very European idea of how
you spend your years between your Ph.D. and your first teaching job. This was
particularly a German idea, that you have four or five years, usually with some sort of

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fellowship or something, to become a real scholar, whereas in the American system
you go straight from being a graduate student to being a junior teacher. This
intermediate phase doesn't really exist in the American system, for most people. A lot
of the junior fellows at Dumbarton Oaks were from the beginning very nervous that
they might miss the bus so far as teaching positions were concerned. So in terms of
personnel this was not well conceived.

I said that I was the only one [who benefitted from the Archives Project];
that's not true. A good friend of mine, Margaret Alexander, who became a fellow at
Dumbarton Oaks in '44 I think, spent her whole life on floor mosaics in Tunisia. She
has become extremely important as an organizer of research on floor mosaics in that
part of North Africa. So I'm not the only one, but there are relatively few that really
got a permanent gain from this.

There was also a parallel project, for the non-art historians, and that was what
Koehler called the fontes — sources — meaning going systematically through early
Christian and Byzantine literature for references to art and works of art. This also
shows how central art was then at Dumbarton Oaks; even the non-art historians were
pressed into service to do something that would ultimately benefit art historians. The
idea was to get fairly comprehensive files about not just art in general, and
descriptions of works of art, but also data concerning buildings — to get the verbal
sources on which to build a true history of late antique and early Byzantine art. The

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people who were doing that were even more impatient, really, because they were not

helping themselves at all; they were only helping the institution. One of these early

Dumbarton Oaks fellows was Milton Anastos. He was made to work on the fontes

and he certainly didn't enjoy it.

SMITH: That's interesting. It is hard to see what the justification for that might be,.

at least from the point of view of the fellowship.

KITZINGER: Yes, and, as I say, from the point of view of the American system, you

are really meant to get into teaching at that stage in your life, not into —

SMITH: Or publication. You are supposed to use your fellowship year to get a

publication organized.

KITZINGER: Someone like Milton Anastos could and I suppose to some extent did

get material for articles out of this, but more or less on the side.

SMITH: Your fellowship was renewed for a second year?

KITZINGER: Well, I had gone for a year, and I may have mentioned that to my

great surprise, when I went to the U.S. Embassy in London to pick up my visa, it was

an immigration visa.

SMITH: That's right, you had mentioned that.

KITZINGER: This put a totally different complexion on this whole American

venture; it meant that I could stay indefinitely and take any work I wanted, and there

were no particular prospects on this side of the Atlantic. So when the fellowship was

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renewed for '42-43, I certainly accepted it and went on with this work.

Then I had to register for the draft, as an immigrant, and did. It must have
been in February or March of '43. There was by then an induction procedure, where I
was rejected on medical grounds, which I can't say I was particularly unhappy about.
In fact, there was this very nice officer who told me, "I think you should go into
intelligence work." Of course Harvard people were all over the place in Washington
by that time, and actually it was through Elizabeth Holt, who lived there, that I got an
interview with someone in the OSS [Office of Strategic Services]. I was then given
the title of Research Analyst in the part of OSS that was called Research and
Analysis, in the geographic section. This of course was a totally new experience from
my point of view, in the sense that I suddenly found myself faced with the task of
gathering information on roads, factories, gas works, and so on.

I can't remember how soon it happened during that time in the OSS in
Washington, but they thought since I had worked on Yugoslavian things and had
something of the language, I should participate in a kind of handbook on Yugoslavia
that was being compiled. Everything was always at very short notice. The whole
thing had to be ready within a month. Of course we had a whole team of people
doing it. So I found myself doing more or less the same thing as I had been doing
with excavation sites, only with a terrifically short time limit and absolutely no chance
of going into any depth. But the methods were more or less the same: you gathered

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your material in a file and systematized it and wrote it up. It was a strange continuity
there, in a sense. Some preparation for this had already taken place at Dumbarton
Oaks, because Harvard had tried to do its bit in the war effort by compiling lists of
monuments for protection. You know about this.
SMITH: Yes, I was going to ask you about that.

KITZINGER: It was the Harvard Defense Group, and Dumbarton Oaks was made
use of for its period, that is to say, late antique and Byzantine. I had made a list of
monuments for Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria already, so that I had some
experience in this kind of compiling work that I was then doing in the OSS. From a
personal point of view it was a very pleasant experience; they were all very nice
people and mostly academics. There were a lot of Yale people in that particular
department in the OSS, whereas the Harvard people were more in the political
intelligence, which I had nothing to do with.
SMITH: But you did get sent then to London?

KITZINGER: Yes, in the spring of '44 the OSS sent me to London. I still didn't
have a passport, and at that point I wrote the traveling paper for that trip myself. I
had to fill out all the personal details myself, and then they put some sort of seal on it.
SMITH: Oh, they didn't give you an American passport, even?
KITZINGER: No. I didn't get an American passport. You see, there was the five-
year [waiting] period. I didn't get it until '48. So I was then attached to OSS

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London, and there I got a totally different job. By that time of course the Germans
were about to lose the war, and there was a lot of talk about their planning a last-
ditch redoubt in the Alps. My task was to sift intelligence that came in as to the
plausibility or implausibility of this, which was really nothing more than rumor, which
the Germans very much encouraged because they wanted to discourage the Allies.
So I had to see what effectively was happening by way of preparation of a last-ditch
defense in the Alps. I had these large maps on my wall. I put different colored pins
into the places where I had some intelligence, and tried to find out what was behind
this.

In a way, one felt an enormous responsibility there, because you could get it
wrong. On the other hand, you knew that you were doing your particular work in
competition with a lot of other outfits which were doing exactly the same thing. It
was in a way comparable to a business enterprise — not in the sense that the OSS was
trying to make money, but that it was trying to outdo Naval intelligence, or the War
Department. They all had their teams doing exactly the same sort of thing, and you
actually met them at different offices and files where you were trying to get your
material and they were also trying to get theirs. So you knew that if you got it
wrong, it didn't necessarily mean that the whole American war effort was going awry,
because there were lots of other people doing it.

The great man at OSS was General "Wild Bill" Donovan. I still remember the

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one occasion when he came to my office to look at my maps and my pins. He was an
impressive man. Of course he had other sources from which he was trying to gather
exactly the same intelligence. Anyway, I did my job as best I could, and I always say,
in effect, there too I was using the same methods of collecting and systematizing as I
do now in my own research. The only difference was, in this case you would know
eventually whether you were right or wrong, whereas in historical research you can
go all your lifetime never knowing whether you are right or wrong. But there it
would in the end come out, wouldn't it? Well, I came out with the conclusion — it
must have been in the winter of '44-45 — that nothing really serious was happening.
There were some things that could be developed in that direction, but essentially there
was no real preparation for a redoubt. And indeed there wasn't.
SMITH: At any time during the war did you think that Germany might win?
KITZINGER: When I was in this internment camp in Surrey; there it was imminent.
Oh yes, and during that year . . . really until the Germans attacked Russia. From there
on one felt that they were over-reaching themselves. I remember I heard of the
invasion of Russia on the way back from Australia. We were in Panama. From that
[moment] one became more confident.

SMITH: When did you first hear about the extermination camps?
KITZINGER: I often ask myself that; I don't really know. I really got to know about
it in the summer of '45, when I was still in OSS London. I was sent to Paris — that

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was my first visit to the Continent after the war — to sift captured documents, and

there I had the evidence in an absolutely appalling way: the lists of people earmarked

for what they called Sonderbehandhmg. That was just horrible; there I had it actually

in my hands, and that was the kind of material that then was used in the Nuremberg

trial. I suppose I certainly knew, yes, because my parents, who were in what was

then called Palestine, were still corresponding with friends and relatives left behind via

the Swiss Red Cross, and my parents in turn told me what sort of information they

got that way. We knew of elderly relatives who had been taken from their homes,

first into strange places, say, in Munich, and then to places like Teresienstadt, which

was not an extermination camp, but one still thought of this as a kind of internment.

When I first heard of actual extermination I don't really know. But it must have been

in my OSS period.

SMITH: So you lost family and friends?

KITZINGER: I lost distant relatives and friends, yes. Not like so many of my friends

who lost just everyone.

SMITH: At what point did you begin to hear about the possibility of an atomic

bomb? Were you aware of its development before Hiroshima?

KITZINGER: Well, let's see. I have to try to reconstruct that. I remember giving a

lecture at Duke University, which was also a strange experience, on the portraits of

Christ. That must have been before I had joined OSS; it must have been in early '43,

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something like that. Duke at that time had the idea of marrying art history and
theology. I had written this little book together with Elizabeth Senior at the British
Museum, Portraits of Christ. I ended this lecture with a Rouault portrait of Christ;
that was the last slide I showed, and that was my undoing, because the theologians in
charge thought, "Anyone who can show a thing like that and call it a portrait of
Christ, no." Well, this was the end so far as my chances at Duke were concerned.
You have to realize I was still very much, certainly in those early Dumbarton Oaks
years, searching for a job. The war would come to an end, and Dumbarton Oaks
fellowships couldn't be renewed endlessly, so a teaching job was one possibility.

Anyway, you asked about the atomic bomb. I think it was on the train going
to Durham, North Carolina. There were two academics talking about the splitting of
the atom and the possibility of a bomb. I remember one saying, "Well, the only proof
of that is when it actually happens; that's the only way you can know whether this
works." So one knew about that, and of course the other thing was that Dumbarton
Oaks had by that time given the main part of its premises to the government, and they
had used it for the Manhattan Project. So while we were studying early Christian
churches, in the other part of the building people were working on the atomic bomb.
That of course we didn't know; we only knew it was hush hush all the way through.
SMITH: Were there any security clearances done on the art historians who were
there?

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KITZINGER: No, but it was physically separate; there were different entrances. You
knew that there was this one part of the building that was still ours, and the rest was
just inaccessible. Later, in '44, there was the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. Because
much of the building was at the disposal of the government, they had decided to have
this preparatory conference there for the United Nations — for San Francisco. And so
too, while all this talk about peace and future peace arrangements were going on in
one part of the building, in another part they were working on the atomic bomb.
SMITH: When the war ended, what was your assessment of the situation in the
world? Were you optimistic about the future, or pessimistic?

KITZINGER: Of course the end of the Nazi regime was an enormously encouraging
experience, and yes, I suppose in general I was optimistic, but as a European who had
lived through the twenties and early thirties, even as a very young person, one was
somewhat skeptical always. This whole friendship that had developed in the twenties
between some German politicians and the French, for instance, trying to bury the axe
forever, hadn't worked. I think compared with a lot of Americans one probably was
more guarded as to the view of the future. But on the whole one certainly thought
that this was a very promising situation.

SMITH: The war ended up with the United States being the major power in the
world, having basically replaced the Western European countries on that level. Did
you think that the United States was in a position to exercise the power that it had

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accumulated in as responsible a manner or more responsible manner than the
European powers had?

KITZINGER: Certainly I was always conscious of a possible turn to isolationism,
and having lived through the earlier period and knowing a little about what happened
in the U.S. Senate in the early twenties, of disowning Wilson and all that, one was
always wondering whether there wouldn't be a return to that. One is hearing it now.
At present this is very much a phenomenon, isn't it — concentrating on the internal
problems, which are big enough. I think one was always a little skeptical of this idea
of America as the savior of the world. But on the other hand, things like the Marshall
Plan were great. I had firsthand experience of its actual impact in Sicily in 1950. I
went there for a year, and there it was absolutely evident what this meant in a
deprived part of Europe.

SMITH: Did you have any sense that academic values might have a particular role to
play in the development of the postwar world?
KITZINGER: No, on that I was always very skeptical.
[Tape VI, Side One]

SMITH: I was asking what you felt the role of academia, and the study of humanities
might be, if any, in providing values for the world, or a sense of meaning?
KITZINGER: I think the way I understood you when you first asked the question
was in terms of peace, really, and international understanding. That immediately

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brought to my mind a story I often tell, which again involves Charles Rufus Morey,
whom I admired greatly as a human being — less so as a scholar. It was I suppose in
'48 that Princeton had its bicentennial as a university. To celebrate that they arranged
a series of international conferences, one of which was on Byzantium. I've never
forgotten this. Morey spoke at the opening ceremony, and this was about three years
after the end of the war. He had a prepared text and was reading it, more or less. It
was the first time after the war that a lot of internationally prominent scholars in that
field had got together; that really hadn't happened yet. So Morey said, "One hopes
that such cooperation will lead to new international institutions and understanding and
development." Then he suddenly looked up and said, "I don't really believe that
anymore." I always thought that was extraordinarily courageous and honest, and this
was very much my own feeling, having gone through all this after World War I.

As I say, I was very young then, but one knew about these League of Nations
organizations — International Intellectual Development it was called, wasn't it?
Intellektuelle Zusammenarbeit I think was the German term. And when you saw how
all this just collapsed in the late twenties and the early thirties, you saw no reason why
this should be any better this time, and the circumstances in which it collapsed were
those of economic adversity. I spoke about my brother and his materialism, and in
this sense he was absolutely right. When the material conditions deteriorate, a lot of
these fine words don't mean anything anymore. So that kind of skepticism really has

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stayed with me. Which doesn't mean that I'm not doing everything I can to promote

in my very narrow, small world, international understanding and cooperation. Now,

for instance, during my last stay in Princeton, I met a young Russian scholar who had

been appointed at the Institute [for Advanced Study] for the year. It was wonderful

to have the chance to make this personal contact, which I had to a limited extent with

Russians before, but it's now much more common. You find these lists of Russians

now all over America, as guests and fellows. So certainly one does what one can, but

in world terms I don't think it means very much.

SMITH: What about the humanities as providing some sense of values and meaning

for the world? Is there a reason for the taxpayers of the world to continue to pay

historians their salaries?

KITZINGER: I just try not to think about this. I'm doing my own thing, so to speak,

because this is something that I want to do, but not really with the idea of changing

the world. And to be honest I have to just put it that way.

SMITH: No, that's fine. I'm not suggesting that there's an answer; I'm just curious

how you may have thought about this.

KITZINGER: To me, well ... the good, the true, and the beautiful certainly are

absolutely essential values. The beautiful in particular, I feel, has been neglected as a

real force in life. But as for persuading others, no.

SMITH: In 1944 you got married.

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KITZINGER: As I said earlier, I met Susan indirectly, through Otto Demus, in the

Fall of 39. We got officially engaged while I was in the States, by letter, and then it

was through being sent back by the OSS that we got together and got married in the

summer of '44.

SMITH: And your wife is British, right?

KITZINGER: Yes, absolutely. Yeoman stock!

SMITH: Is she an art historian too?

KITZINGER: No, she was here in Oxford at the Ruskin school, which is a painting

and drawing school. At that time it had officially nothing to do with the university at

all. Now it is semi-integrated with the university, but at that time it wasn't, and Susan

painted; that was her thing. So we had this interest in art in common, but from very

different angles. Otto Demus always teased her as being headed straight for the

Royal Academy, which was very conventional at that time, though it isn't quite so

conventional anymore. She did portraits and landscapes.

My wife's family is very conventionally Church of England, but she entirely on
her own became a Quaker, so she had always a kind of feeling for the underdog and
the unfortunate. I suppose that also had something to do with her being interested in
refugees like myself. She was a firm pacifist when we met, and this was something of
a problem, because I couldn't believe in pacifism anymore. I had believed in pacifism
in the pre-Hitler period, but I found it extremely difficult to maintain my belief in

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these circumstances. So we had discussions on that.

After I had been interned Susan started doing relief work for the Quakers, and
she continued that all through the war. She worked in the East End of London,
looking after people who had sheltered in the tube stations. She then worked with
evacuated children in Lancashire, and also near the south coast at various times, so
that's how she spent the war. We got married in July of '44, and our first child was
born at the end of the war, in May of '45. By that time Susan had stopped working. I
had to go back to the States once the war was over. The OSS took me back to
America on the Queen Elizabeth, but for Susan and the baby this was much more of a
problem. She didn't finally get a place on a boat until the very beginning of 1946.
SMITH: Oh, so it took a while.

KITZINGER: It took a while. So we then established ourselves in Washington.
SMITH: You spent most of your professional life based in the United States.
KITZINGER: Yes

SMITH: Did you maintain a home in England during the entire time?
KITZINGER: No, but Susan's mother died when she was quite young, and her father
had remarried and they had a very nice house in Surrey, which now belongs to Susan's
half brother. That's where we got married and that's where our first child was born,
and so we still feel very much at home there in that sense, but we didn't maintain a
home of our own then. When I retired from Harvard, in 79, we decided that we

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would make our main base in England, and then decided on Oxford. Of course Susan
had these connections way back from the Ruskin school, and I also had been here a
lot, so this was a logical place in which to settle down. Above all, I needed a good
library, although the library here isn't really all that good for medieval art.
SMITH: But then you also spend three months a year at Princeton?
KITZINGER: In Princeton, yes, and the two locations are very complementary. A lot
of things that I don't find here I find at Princeton, and vice versa. The older non-art
books that I need are more likely to be here than in Princeton, so it's very good, as
long as I can do the shuttling back and forth.
SMITH: You have three children, right?

KITZINGER: Yes. The other two were born in the States. Our daughter Rachel,
who was born in '48, is the only one who sort of followed, more or less, in her father's
footsteps. She fell in love with the classics in high school and studied Greek, and now
she teaches Greek at Vassar College.

Our younger son is really an artist, a painter. That still life, the flower
painting, is an early work of Adrian's. So he's definitely on his mother's [side]. He
actually came here to the Ruskin School as a student.
SMITH: And your oldest son?

KITZINGER: Our oldest son, Tony [Stephen Anthony], is interested in art, but he's
also very good with his hands, with anything mechanical, which he certainly hasn't got

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from me. As an adolescent he developed a passion for photography, and that then
turned into design and typography. He started out at Swarthmore College, which
didn't work out, he was a dropout from there, and then came over here. He always
gravitated very much towards his mother's milieu and country. So he came here, and
having been born here he had no problem. Reading University was the one place
where there was a course in typography and book design. So that's his profession.
He worked for different publishers over the years and is now a freelance book
designer and typographer. He works a lot with computers.
SMITH: So he's here in England?
KITZINGER: He's in London.
SMITH: And your younger son, the painter, is where?
KITZINGER: The younger son is in New York ... a very hard struggle.
SMITH: Having a family with three children, how did that affect your ability to do
research? Were you able just to pick up the family and move to Sicily for a year?
KITZINGER: Well, that was one of the brighter aspects of this, because that was a
Fulbright [grant], and for once we had enough money. This was the very beginning
of the Fulbright scheme; I think it was the second year that it was in operation. I had
some trouble getting it. I still remember this man at the Fulbright office saying, "You
know, Fulbright is not a scheme for sending Europeans back to Europe." Which was
quite true. But I had a very tangible object, namely these twelfth-century mosaics in

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Sicily, and this is what did it, really, because all these young American scholars who
wanted to go to Italy chose Rome or Florence or Milan, but no one wanted to go to
Sicily. Sicily was very much a place where the American image mattered a lot at that
point. The crucial election in Italy had been in '48, and the communists nearly won.
The whole country might have gone into the Soviet block. When that was averted,
then it became very important to cultivate the American image.

So I got this Fulbright grant. They hadn't really quite figured out yet how
much money people needed in Italy; insofar as they had figured it out, it was based on
Rome. But Sicily was quite a bit cheaper than Rome, so for us, after a very difficult
time with two young children in Washington, this was a period of affluence; in fact we
were able to buy a car. It was always said at the time, all the Negro — as one would
call them then — servants at Dumbarton Oaks arrived in these big flashy cars, and the
scholars didn't have any cars. So it was only out of this Fulbright money that we were
able to buy a car, which we then at the end of the year shipped back to America.

I have often talked to younger people, of your generation, about how
economic conditions for scholars have improved since the war. It was really quite
incredible the way Harvard, for instance, treated its younger scholars at that time. Of
course in a setting like Dumbarton Oaks this was particularly apparent because of the
luxury all around, and then there was this utter penury in which we lived. In
Washington it was particularly aggravated by the war situation, because

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accommodation was still very scarce, and a lot of people hadn't left yet from their war
service. We had a terribly hard time finding anything. Finally we found a place in a
very racially mixed street, in a dilapidated house that actually belonged to the Society
of Friends, the Quakers; that's how we were able to get a place, because of my wife's
Quaker connections. We invited the then director of Dumbarton Oaks to dinner in
our living room, and we asked the lodger upstairs to take a shower while our guest
was there, because we knew that when he took a shower the water would come
through the ceiling, and we thought it would impress the director to see the
conditions in which we lived.

SMITH: This was A. M. Friend you're talking about?

KITZINGER: No, this was Jack [John S] Thacher. This is something we'll have to
get to when we talk about Dumbarton Oaks. Thacher was a creature, really, of the
Blisses, from the same wealthy milieu, and they installed him as the first administrative
officer — there was no director — side by side with the senior fellows, of whom
Koehler was really the most important at that time. When Friend came he became
director of studies, that was the title that he assumed, side by side with Thacher, who
became director.

I ought to say that Jack Thacher became a good friend of mine and during the
years when I was director of studies it was really essential, this relationship. I got to
like him a lot, but at the beginning it was not clear that he was much in sympathy with

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what the scholars were doing. He actually had an art history degree from the

Courtauld.

SMITH: You became an assistant professor in '46. Did you have any teaching

responsibilities?

KITZINGER: No, Dumbarton Oaks was purely research. You had to actually

promise that you would not take outside engagements except with permission. But,

so that these young scholars would have some teaching experience, and also to

[enable] Harvard students to benefit from the expertise that existed four hundred

miles away, it was arranged that Harvard could invite Dumbarton Oaks faculty

members for a term at a time. Three terms had to elapse before the same person

could be asked again.

The first time I went to Harvard to teach was in 1947, and I gave a course
then on medieval sculpture, and a seminar, together with Koehler, on Anglo-Saxon
art. I went to Sicily in '50—51, and I went again to Harvard in '52 for a term. When I
became director of studies at Dumbarton Oaks, going to Harvard was quite out of the
question until 1960, when I went for a term once more. So there were three
occasions during my years at Dumbarton Oaks when I did do a term of teaching.

The junior fellows from the beginning had been Ph.D.'s, but then we started
experimenting with a pre-Ph.D. category of fellows: junior junior fellows, who were
working on a subject that was germane to Dumbarton Oaks. So once we had these

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junior junior fellows, there was a certain amount of individual tutoring that was

possible within the Dumbarton Oaks framework. At least one or two young people I

did teach in that sense.

SMITH: But your immersion in the U.S. academic environment was different from

most experiences?

KITZINGER: Totally, yes. It was a handicap throughout my professional life in

America, that I didn't have the experience myself of an American education. I only

knew it from the outside, really. I always had difficulty putting myself in the place of

my own students later on at Harvard, because my own experience had been so

different. That was always a problem.

SMITH: You had said yesterday that it was only when you came to the U.S. that

your intellectual project of connecting the social and the political and the art began to

come together. I suppose some of that had to do with the conditions under which

you were working, from a museum to a research institute. I guess you were in a

position where you could get to know the terrain of American art history; you could

become familiar with the different institutions.

KITZINGER: The Archives Project I worked on with Koehler was from my point of

view very organic, but that was probably in part because it was really the concept of a

European scholar, which is what Koehler was. He became a very good friend. I

should say a little about him. He was a very remarkable scholar. As a very young

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man, he had been commissioned to do a corpus of the illuminated manuscripts of the
Carolingian period, and this became his life's work. He had published two
monumental volumes in the early thirties. The School of Tours was one of the key
groups of Carolingian illuminated manuscripts, and these volumes were to me
absolute models of publication in my British Museum days, especially when I was
doing this little book on early medieval art, because this was one restricted group of
monuments which had really been dealt with in an exemplary way. Koehler was a
student of Dvorak's; in fact, his School of Tours books are dedicated to Dvorak.
Koehler's own method was one of very close stylistic analysis, particularly of
ornament, and one volume of the two is entirely concerned with initials and frame
ornaments. I thought his whole analysis of ornament was just perfect; he developed
his own terminology. So that had a great influence on me, long before I met him.

When I was then put onto this project, under Koehler's guidance, I was very at
home there. After these rather scattered, different pursuits in England, without any
real focus, it meant that I was on firm ground again, and very much building up on
things I had always been interested in, particularly these mosaic floors, which brought
in both the formal side — there's a lot of ornament there — and a lot of figure work.
The figure work involved then the society that had created it, their intellectual
interests and so on, so there was a link with this problem of what you do with the
floor in the church, which brought in the whole question of images in a cult building.

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These proved very interesting questions. There were, for instance, masses of animals
represented on the floors. What do they mean*7 Is it just ornament, or has it got a
meaning? So this work both built on what I had done earlier and provided new goals.
These first years at Dumbarton Oaks were very fruitful, as I say, in a very organic
way.

But Koehler never got along with the Blisses, who were still very much in the
picture. The Blisses had another mansion in Santa Barbara (inherited from Mrs.
Bliss's mother), and they withdrew there when they gave Dumbarton Oaks to
Harvard, but Mr. Bliss, who was in the diplomatic service, did war work in
Washington, at the State Department, so they got themselves what they called their
"shanty," which was a very nice house about three blocks away from Dumbarton
Oaks, in Georgetown. From there they observed what was going on, and they and
Koehler didn't hit it off at all. So after two years his position there as senior fellow
came to an end. That also had to do in part with the fact that he had pressed the non-
art fellows into the service of art, and that didn't go down at all well.

Koehler was then succeeded by George La Piana, who was a Sicilian and a
very good scholar. He had left Italy when the fascists came in, and he was a member
of the history department at Harvard. He was interested in early church history,
primarily, and to him, art, insofar as it was of any importance at all, was only a
handmaiden to the church historian or theologian, and not vice versa.

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So there was this conflict right from the beginning, and this goes then through
the whole history of Dumbarton Oaks, and this was no secret; it was obvious at the
time. Koehler's failure was already a manifestation of that conflict, in a way, aside
from the personal factor. So, when I came back from the war, A. M. Friend had been
invited to become what used to be called senior fellow and then was called director of
studies. His agenda was totally different from Koehler's, and I was in great difficulty
right from the beginning, because although Friend had written one very important
article on the Book of Kells, he was not interested in ornament as I was. He was
interested essentially in the important historical figures and institutions creating art; in
other words, patronage came in a lot, and ideas outside the realm of art that
determined the making of monuments.

Friend's own project at Dumbarton Oaks, in which he also tried to get the
younger people involved, was recreating important lost monuments of Byzantium,
insofar as they could be reconstructed. The most central object in his own work was
one church in Constantinople, the Church of the Holy Apostles. It had been founded
by Constantine, the founder of Constantinople, and was intended to be his own
mausoleum, which it became. Along with Saint Sophia it was an important church all
throughout the centuries of Byzantine existence. The church was destroyed by the
Turks in the sixteenth century, but we have medieval descriptions of its architecture
and its mosaic decoration. Friend was trying to recreate that decoration, mainly by

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making use of illuminated manuscripts in which he saw reflections of these mosaics.
So the whole thing was, in a way, and putting it very bluntly, a house of cards. The
monument didn't exist, and being non-existent it gave opportunities for a great deal of
speculation.

Friend wanted every one of us younger ones in some way to contribute to this
project or related projects. A certain amount was known about the architecture.
Even in the Middle Ages it was known that San Marco in Venice was a copy of the
Holy Apostles. Venice wanted its own apostles church, and Saint Mark was the
apostle who had founded their see, supposedly. So something was known about the
architecture and the decoration of the Constantinopolitan church, but Friend's main
point was to connect the iconography to important theologians and church leaders.
He saw the whole thing as an actual creation of the theological and political ideas of
the time. While I got a lot out of this, and this is where the thing was positive, I
absolutely rejected the idea of building everything up on lost monuments.

So I was always somewhat in opposition, and Friend knew this. He was an
intelligent man and a rather powerful figure, and he also knew about my close links
with Koehler, with whom he [shared] no common ground at all. I found a lot of
things that Friend did stimulating, particularly insofar as the intellectual role of
patrons was concerned, but I wanted to work with existing monuments and [pursue]
my deep interest in their style, in their artistic forms, and what happens to artistic

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forms over a longer time stretch. That didn't interest Friend at all. If he was
interested in style at all, it was only in order to help date undated monuments. If a
miniature looked very much like another miniature for which there was a date, then in
that sense style was a help, but only in that sense.

My way out of this difficult situation was Sicily. Although Friend's own work
was entirely concerned with lost monuments, he wanted the mosaic monuments of
Italy dealt with because of the light they could throw on Constantinopolitan ones. So
Otto Demus, who had done work on Venice earlier, in prewar days, and whose Ph.D.
thesis had been on San Marco, was invited to do the mosaics of Venice, and I took on
Sicily.

[Tape VI, Side Two]

KITZINGER: [The Sicily material was from] a relatively late period. I had only been
working with monuments up to the eighth and ninth centuries, and here were these
key monuments of the twelfth century, and so by starting to work on those I found I
was gaining a firm basis in a much later period.

SMITH: I'm wondering, perhaps we should hold off the discussion of the Cappella
Palatina until tomorrow.

KITZINGER: Yes, fine. You asked me about intellectual influences in Dumbarton
Oaks, and that certainly was important in the late forties. Friend's [approach] was
very different from anything I had experienced before, but it did bring in literature and

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theology, and I learned a lot from that.

SMITH: Weitzmann said that Friend was the most brilliant man he had ever met. He

evidently didn't publish much in his lifetime, so it's the brilliance of the raconteur, I

suppose.

KITZINGER: Well, the "brilliance of the raconteur" I wouldn't quite say. I would

say the brilliance of speculative scholarship. He had read a lot of theology, and I

certainly learned a lot from him. He was able to show how in Byzantium, certainly,

theological and political thinking had been reflected in art. It was quite clear. He

gave lectures in which he built up these ideas in a very compelling way. You were

carried away by this because it was beautifully constructed, but then in the end you'd

ask yourself, "Is that really true? What's the actual evidence?" And that very often

turned out to be defective. I wouldn't compare him with Panofsky, but he was a very

intelligent man, certainly, and knew a lot.

SMITH: Buchthal said, yes, he was a very brilliant man, but "evil," which is the

actual adjective he used to describe him.

KITZINGER: Have you ever read Der Zauberbergl

SMITH: Yes.

KITZINGER: Well I always compare him with Naphta.

SMITH: Oh, really"?

KITZINGER: The opposite to Settembrini, the humanist, you know, the counterpart,

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the Jesuit, the calculating —

SMITH: Oh, that's interesting.

KITZINGER: If you call that "evil," that's a question of values.

SMITH: I guess I would have thought of him more on the Settembrini side.

KITZINGER: Oh no, not at all.

SMITH: The constant flow of words.

KITZINGER: Well yes, in that sense, the brilliance, yes. But the spirit and the

philosophy was Naphta's, absolutely. I think he was really interested in Jesuits, in

their methods.

SMITH: A number of the German emigres that we've interviewed have said that

coming to America liberated them to think more speculatively than their German

education had allowed, and that was a positive aspect, they felt, in terms of freeing

their thinking to make connections that they might not have made otherwise.

KITZINGER: Well, that was certainly true in my case, but I would attribute that

more to the shortness of my training in Germany than to America as such, because if

you think of an art historian like [Hans] Sedlmayr, if he wasn't speculative, I don't

know what speculative is.

SMITH: Or Josef Strzygowski, or Pinder, for that matter.

KITZINGER: Well, yes. So it was just a certain kind of speculation that in my case

proved very interesting. I say particularly in regard to extra-artistic factors

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influencing or having a bearing on art. That's what I hoped originally to find in
Hamburg, but I never got there. I then got it very indirectly from Panofsky because
he influenced the Princeton people a lot. Among the Princeton people it certainly was
Friend who had the broadest view, because what Morey did was all very much within
the canon; you know, counting the number of times a certain attribute occurred with a
certain saint and so on. That wasn't what Friend was doing; he was concerned much
more with iconology as distinct from iconography, and in that sense his [ideas] related
to Panofsky. I think it was Panofsky who said that Friend was the only one of this
Princeton group whom he accepted on the level of a European colleague. So Friend
was a very knowledgeable and intelligent man, there's no question.

Weitzmann was an ideal collaborator for Friend because he supplied him with
all these manuscripts that he needed in order to reconstruct his churches, so he was
extremely useful to him. Weitzmann in turn got a lot out of his relationship with
Friend. He had been looking at miniatures only in terms of style; that was his own
training from Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt would never make connections with
theology or anything else. So Weitzmann was induced to look at the text as well as
the pictures that the texts illustrated, and it added a further dimension to his own
work. There was a strong mutual kind of symbiosis that developed out of this, in
which, however, Friend was certainly the more creative side. Weitzmann's work
always had a somewhat mechanical quality. What troubles me is the way he then in

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his later writings, particularly when he wrote about the history of scholarship in
America, made Dumbarton Oaks a kind of outpost of Princeton. I don't know if
you've seen Weitzmann's posthumously published autobiography?
SMITH: No, I haven't.

KITZINGER: There was an exhibition at Princeton that he organized on Byzantium,
which had an introduction, and there he [characterized] Dumbarton Oaks as just a
dependance of Princeton, and this is absurd. Certainly Friend's tenure there was very
important, but as I say, the first man who had created a scholarly program for
Dumbarton Oaks was Koehler, not Friend. Friend's program, in its own way, was as
problematic as Koehler's because it was really totally built on his own specific
interests in these particular monuments.
SMITH: Did you get to know Panofsky at this time?

KITZINGER: Yes, in my visits to Princeton, and Panofsky also came to Dumbarton
Oaks. I got to know him fairly well, and then considerably later I had a year at
Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study, in 1966-67, by which time Panofsky
was retired, but he was around and I saw quite a lot of him. One of the early
contacts — it's vivid in my mind — was when Panofsky published his slim volume,
Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. I remember a really rather violent discussion
with him, sitting in the common room at Dumbarton Oaks. I was very interested by
that time in how philosophy or theology [influenced] art, but I didn't feel that he had

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shown that scholastic philosophy had actually influenced the architecture of Notre

Dame, which is what he claimed. What I felt he had done was to show that the

development of facade architecture in thirteenth-century France was a dialectical

process from one facade to the next that could be compared with scholasticism, but

not that one facade itself embodied scholastic philosophy. So we had a rather fierce

discussion on that point, but all very friendly. I was always on very good terms with

him.

SMITH: What did you think of Otto von Simson's book on the relationship of the

Gothic cathedral to scholastic mathematics [The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of

Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order]?

KITZINGER: I thought that was more successful. He brings in, as Panofsky did too

in his book on Saint Denis [Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis and Its

Art Treasures], the tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius. Otto von Simson and I were

students together in Munich.

SMITH: Oh, I thought he was a little later than you.

KITZINGER: No, we coincided there, but didn't know each other terribly well then.

We got closer during that difficult summer of '33. He had moved in very elevated

circles — he's always had these aristocratic connections — and I didn't. But then during

that summer, when he found himself sidelined, he came to our house and I got to

know him better. I always liked him and admired his work.

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SMITH: Did you like his book on Ravenna [Sacred Fortress: Byzantine Art and

Statecraft in Ravenna]!

KITZINGER: Yes, I remember I was asked to read it for the Chicago Press, and I

gave a very favorable judgment.

SMITH: Yes, he taught at Chicago. That's a book that struck me as being quite

ambitious and perhaps speculative in the way in which it drew political implications

out of liturgy.

KITZINGER: But he had had this approach from way back. As a student in Munich

his thesis was on the Medici cycle of Rubens and even then he was way ahead of me,

and much more anticipating general interests of the fifties and sixties and

seventies — not stuck as I was in formalism. To me, Rubens was just Wolfflin's offene

Formen and the very antithesis to Renaissance, but Simson was interested in the

Medici patronage and the political ideas behind it. Even as a student he was already

working along that line, and this Ravenna book is simply doing the same thing in a

different setting.

SMITH: And without the benefit of having seen the monuments.

KITZINGER: Well, he saw the Rubens sketches.

SMITH: Yes, he had seen them, but he wrote the book without having been to

Ravenna.

KITZINGER: Well, that's quite possible. And this is the other side of that: that you

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are too far away from the object.

SMITH: Of course, when he wrote the book he couldn't go see it, but as I recall he

had never seen it, so it was the idea that was intriguing him, the relationship between

the plan and the liturgy.

KITZINGER: Yes. Well, all those things did become important to me in the forties,

but had not been so before.

SMITH: You were paid by Harvard, so you were formally part of the Harvard

faculty, in a way. What was your impression of the Harvard Fine Arts Department

and its approach to art history?

KITZINGER: Well, Dumbarton Oaks had its own budget, so I wasn't strictly

speaking at that point paid by Harvard. I must say, this was one of Friend's positive

acts: he insisted that these junior scholars at Dumbarton Oaks be made members of

the Harvard faculty. But so far as Harvard was concerned, we were really just that;

we had no rank in Harvard.

SMITH: Well, junior faculty at Harvard had no standing whatsoever anyway.

KITZINGER: Yes, but there was this hierarchy of instructor, assistant professor,

associate professor, and so on, and Friend insisted that this same hierarchical structure

should be introduced at Dumbarton Oaks. All four of us (Milton Anastos, Glanville

Downey, Paul Underwood, and myself) in 1946 started out as assistant professors.

But that rank applied only at Dumbarton Oaks; we didn't have any rank at Harvard.

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So we were not really part of the Harvard community at all, and of course to this day
this four-hundred-mile distance is a very important factor as far as Dumbarton Oaks is
concerned.

I first was invited to teach at Cambridge for one term in 1947, and my
impression was that the faculty was very divided at that time between the older
American generation, of whom the main figure was, I suppose, Chandler Post, in
Spanish painting — very much connoisseurship, and names and dates — and Leonard
Opdyke, another younger faculty member in the same tradition, as against the
Europeans. They had a committee, which was chaired by Jakob Rosenberg, who I
thought was well chosen because he was a very conciliatory, very gentle person, who
would smooth the waters when they might get ruffled. But the idea was to modernize
the exam system, particularly, and to ask questions that encouraged independent
thought.

So there were these strong conflicts within the department. Paul Sachs, who
was the chairman of the department, was very much in the connoisseurship tradition
himself, but he sympathized to some extent with the Europeans, whom he himself had
been partly instrumental in bringing there. I, being just a guest for one term, didn't
really get involved, but one student who took my course was then preparing for his
exam, took the exam, and collapsed of a heart attack in a little cafe near the Fogg
Museum the next day and died. That was the final straw so far as the traditional

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method of the exam was concerned. It would be interesting to find in the record
somewhere whether that was in '47 or not till '52.
SMITH: I think it's '52; it's been mentioned by other people.
KITZINGER: And of course that became a catalyst for change.
SMITH: Yes. Did you know the people at Yale? Yale was a stronghold of the
Focillon tradition, but also of interest in medieval art.

KITZINGER: Yes, when did I first go to Yale? I suppose I gave a lecture. This is
the sort of thing that now really has become difficult to [retrieve]. I remember dinner
at Sumner [McKnight] Crosby's house. I don't know how much you know about
him — a very wealthy, Middlewestern family. General Foods money, or something.
My impression at Yale was that all these faculty members were wealthy gentlemen.
Probably not all of them were wealthy anymore at that time, but this was the
impression one got, particularly in the art department; it was very smug and self-
sufficient, and not terribly interesting intellectually.
SMITH: The wealthy background was typical of both Harvard and Yale.
KITZINGER: It was true of Harvard too, with Sachs and Forbes. Yes, it was of
course very much a tradition. This was partly also the trouble with penniless junior
faculty, that they couldn't really quite empathize with the difficult position that these
young people were in.
SMITH: Yes, at Harvard they stopped having weekly cocktail parties because the

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junior faculty couldn't afford to mount them the way the senior faculty could. What
about the Institute of Fine Arts, and Columbia, the two New York institutions?
KITZINGER: I had very little contact with Columbia. I remember giving a lecture
there. Otto Brendel I think was the one who invited me there. I ought to perhaps go
back at this point to my days in England before the war and the early years of the war.
When the packing in the British Museum came to an end, in 1940, and there was
nothing more to do and no job for me, at that point the Warburg did take me on; they
hired me to sort out photographs, giving them labels and so on, and the man in charge
of the photographic collection there was [Rudolf] Wittkower.
SMITH: Oh, right, yes

KITZINGER: That's why I go back there at this point, because I was a kind of
assistant to Wittkower for a very brief period at the Warburg in 1940. I got along
well with him; he was a very big, comfortable man. And I then met him again at
Columbia later, but I didn't have much contact with Columbia.
SMITH: What about Meyer Schapiro. Did you interact with him?
KITZINGER: Yes, I'm sorry, I forgot about him. I got to know him and visited him
a number of times in his Greenwich Village house. Also, I spent part of the winter of
'53-54 at the American Academy in Rome, and Meyer Schapiro was there that
winter, so we spent quite a lot of time together there. I was always in contact with
him. I sent him offprints and he sent me offprints. He of course was very stimulating,

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but very much involved in his own ideas, not all that interested in other people's. I
remember almost every time that you sent him an offprint you got back a letter
pointing out something that you had missed that he had written on. I think he was
very, and probably still is, somewhat self-centered, but very brilliant. But we got
along very well. When the book I did on the mosaics of Monreale came out, in 1960
[The Mosaics of Monreale], Schapiro wrote a critique of it which I thought was really
quite unfair, but anyway, I got along with him.

One of my less glorious experiences was in '57 or '58, by which time I was
director of studies at Dumbarton Oaks and really very busy. The Institute of Fine
Arts invited me to give a course of four lectures on early Byzantine art, and they were
a disaster. I was naive about this; I thought that I knew this subject so well that I
didn't really [have to prepare much], otherwise I wouldn't have done it, because I was
too busy. I thought I'd just get my slides together and do it more or less off the cuff,
and this turned out to be a mistake. The framework I had for the course of lectures
was still very much style and the development of style, as distinct from the other
interests that I had developed on the theological, philosophical, and political sides of
Byzantium. These four lectures went down like a lead balloon! I was quite
desperate, really. I remember taking the train to New York; it was a weekly thing,
spread over four weeks, and after the first lecture, every time I had to go back I
thought, "This is just awful."

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SMITH: Was it the kinds of questions that were being asked, or lack of response?
KITZINGER: Lack of response. There were no questions. People did comment
afterwards. One of the people who could tell you a lot about this is Ilene Forsyth,
whom you've no doubt met at Ann Arbor.
SMITH: No, I haven't met her.

KITZINGER: Oh, she is the widow of George [H.] Forsyth, who was a medieval
architectural historian, and she is a medieval art historian. They weren't married at
that time; she was a student at NYU, and he was a Princeton product and taught at
Ann Arbor. Ilene attended this course [of lectures], and I'm sure she has very
negative things to say. I certainly had no positive reaction. But people were very
polite, and there was no actual catastrophe. The man in charge was Craig [Hugh]
Smyth, whom you interviewed. He is now a good friend, whom I had hardly met, I
suppose, before that point.

I felt terribly uncomfortable about this; it was my only major experience with
the Institute of Fine Arts. Otherwise it was just personal contacts — Richard
Krautheimer of course, and people like [Peter Heinrich von] Blanckenhagen, who was
a fellow Buschor student from Munich. They were all perfectly polite and nice, but
these lectures were not a success. They were, however, a stepping stone towards
what became this book Byzantine Art in the Making, which has essentially that same
structure of stylistic phases; that was the framework for the lectures, although

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subsequently I did try to build in as much as I could of the non-art factors that were

important. When I gave those NYU lectures that [aspect of it] was still very much in

its infancy, and I didn't really work that out until I came to do the Slade Lectures in

Cambridge.

SMITH: In the postwar period, but maybe particularly in the fifties, did you see a

new approach to art history developing in the United States through a synthesis of the

German and the American traditions, or did they remain somewhat distinct, would

you say?

KITZINGER: There was interaction. I described Jakob Rosenberg at Harvard trying

to reconcile the Chandler Post tradition with what he had brought from Germany,

which of course also contained a strong connoisseurship element in his own case. At

Princeton, the Weitzmann-Goldschmidt tradition was absorbed by Friend for his own

purposes, who in turn then influenced Weitzmann with his own tradition. So there

were these interactions. Synthesis? Who would exemplify synthesis there? Well, in a

sense I do myself.

SMITH: Yes, you do. Or perhaps the younger generation of Americans. I'm

thinking of somebody like James Ackerman.

KITZINGER: Yes, he was very much a Krautheimer disciple. And Panofsky himself

always said how much he got from this change-over in America, which was to some

extent sort of an apple-polishing exercise, but there was a kernel of truth in that. It

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brought him down to earth.

SMITH: His writing does change.

KITZINGER: His writing, certainly, that is obvious. If you read his prewar German

writing it's almost as difficult as Kant. It was obvious that his style changed, but also

the content, and it did bring him down to earth to some extent.

SMITH: One last technical question, then we'll end for today. I presume that you

write in English directly?

KITZINGER: Yes

SMITH: When did you start doing that, and how did you train yourself to write in

English?

KITZINGER: When I started working at the British Museum, I made my notes

concerning those Anglo-Saxon sculptures in English from the word go, no matter

how incorrect. My English was fairly good. I had been taught English from the age

of nine, so it wasn't a new language, but I made it a point to make all those notes in

English right away. Whatever I published I wrote in English, but I always had friends

to correct it and I learned a lot from the correcting. The really crucial experience

there was the text of the early medieval art book, because when I had written it

Kendrick gave copies of the typescript to three colleagues. One was Francis

Wormald. In Wormald's case it was certainly more for the contents, because I dealt a

lot with manuscripts and they were in his department. One of the great points about

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this little book was that it did draw on different departments, which was practically
unknown before. People published catalogs and guidebooks about material in their
own department, but to have a British Museum publication that drew on material
from different departments was new.

I meant to mention yesterday that one forerunner that this little book had in
the British Museum was a book that Roger Hinks had written, very much on the basis
of his very German-oriented scholarship, on Greek and Roman portrait sculpture.
That was a little book which I suppose can still be bought in the British Museum. It
used British Museum examples to illustrate a brief overall history of its subject. That
was the one near precedent that existed for this early medieval art book.

Anyway, here was this manuscript written by this immigrant, in broken
English, and it was given to three or four people; one was Wormald, and another was
Christopher [C. F. C] Hawkes, who was a good friend. Hawkes was under Kendrick
in the department. We all got together — I can still see us sitting there in the
department office — and each one of these people read out to me the changes and
corrections that they proposed. I had to decide whether this was what I meant or
didn't mean. And this was a very strange and difficult thing; it was a great mental
effort, and it went on for several days. It was comparable in that sense to what we're
doing now. I had to decide on the spot whether something was right, from my point
of view, or not. But in the process I learned a lot about how to put things in English.

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I did essentially the same thing at other times — giving my writing to colleagues to

correct — only not in such concentrated form. Of course by the time this session took

place, in late '39, the war had started and one no longer spoke German, if one could

help it, in the street.

SMITH: Oh, of course, yes.

KITZINGER: There were stories of all these German refugees in Hampstead, a part

of London where they mostly lived, being warned when they were on buses, "You'd

better speak English!" So that was another factor in this; you really gave up German

at that point. In more recent decades, I suppose, I no longer had anyone go over my

manuscripts.

SMITH: So by the time the war was over you would —

KITZINGER: I would still give things to colleagues to read anyway, because of

subject problems, and they would then I suppose tell me, "You'd better phrase this a

little differently," and so on. But in more recent times I no longer have had anyone do

any systematic correcting. So that's the story of my English.

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SESSION FOUR: 25 FEBRUARY, 1995

[Tape VII, Side One]

SMITH: You had a postscript to yesterday's session?

KITZINGER: Well, when we talked about [the] Fulbright [grant], and I said that for

us it was a spell of prosperity in an otherwise really very Spartan existence in

Washington, I should have made two points there. One was that the money had to be

spent in Italy. These were counterpart funds, which is what the Fulbright program

was based on. The money was owed to the U.S. government and couldn't be

converted into dollars, so it had to be spent in Italy. The other point was that we

were told right at the beginning, in a sort of briefing session for all the Fulbright

people, that we must try to keep on the level of the lifestyle of our Italian colleagues

with whom we were in contact. This was extremely difficult. We had all that money,

and it had to be spent very inconspicuously. I just wanted to say that, because by just

saying it was a prosperous period I didn't really give the full picture.

SMITH: Was the fifties a period of relatively easy access to research support in

America?

KITZINGER: I think compared with what it is now, perhaps it was, yes. The

Fulbright [program] was fantastic; it had just started, and for anyone who wanted to

work abroad, in any country that had counterpart funds, it was wonderful.

SMITH: Did you get research money later?

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KITZINGER: I had a second spell in Italy. I spent a winter at the American
Academy in Rome, in '54, with a view to completing the material for my Sicilian
project, and during that year I had a Guggenheim Fellowship.
SMITH: I wanted to get into some of your writing.

KITZINGER: Yes. You said you were going to talk about the Cappella Palatina, but
I wonder whether I shouldn't say something more about the coffin of Saint Cuthbert
[first], because chronologically and biographically that study really belongs to the
thirties. This was a big publication involving a lot of people, and it was delayed by
the war, so it didn't come out till '56, but there was actually a slim preliminary volume
on the coffin published by the Oxford University Press in 1950. [showing book] If
you look at the frontispiece of that, that was just to publish the drawings which the
cathedral architect had made, but from this you see what was involved — a jigsaw
puzzle.

SMITH: Oh, yes.

KITZINGER: All of my work on this was really done in '38, '39. It's the one case in
my life where what I did actually had a physical impact on the object itself.
Everything else was theory and verbiage, but in this case these fragments, as you see
them here assembled, had been a jigsaw puzzle in the Durham Cathedral Library. A
nineteenth-century canon of the cathedral had made a half-scale model reconstructing
the coffin. When I came on the scene, I was just supposed to write something about

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the carvings on the coffin, but I realized that the reconstruction was wrong. The
cathedral architect made full-scale drawings of every fragment, which I then took with
me to London. I played around with them and arrived at a new reconstruction of the
whole object, which meant that the measurements were different. They already had
mounts prepared for the fragments, and they all had to be changed. The result was
what you see here in this frontispiece: these boards were prepared to reassemble the
coffin, with the actual pieces mounted on them So, as I say, it's one case where I had
a physical impact on the thing I was working on.

Perhaps the way I have been talking about my intellectual development put
too much emphasis on what happened once I got to America and made new contacts.
In the reconstruction of this coffin, for instance, I went into the liturgy of the time,
seventh-century Northumbria, which involved the Celtic element versus the Roman
element; that became the conflict there, and the way it had a bearing on this particular
object only came out through my re-reconstruction of the fragments. There are the
twelve apostles on one side, and the order in which they are arranged turned out to be
that of the liturgy of the Roman Mass, where the twelve apostles are named. In the
Celtic sphere there were also lists of the twelve apostles, but they were in a different
arrangement. So I got rather deeply into textual matters there. I don't want to give
the impression that everything of that kind happened to me only in America.
SMITH: Were you also concerned with the political ramifications of the theology?

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KITZINGER: Well, yes, up to a point. I did get into Anglo-Saxon history there, and
that was then reinforced from a different side through the Sutton Hoo discovery,
which was the following year. It became known as England's Tutankhamen, I mean it
was that kind of fantastic treasure. The whole historic situation in that part of
England, East Anglia, came into play, and also there were connections with the
Northumbrian situation. So all these things did come into [play], I thought I'd given
too much of an impression that I was only interested in style at that point, and that
wasn't true.

I still feel, and I think I said that in an earlier session, that to me some of the
most satisfactory things that I've done were on single objects, single monuments, from
which I could branch out into these different non-art fields.
Saint Cuthbert's coffin was that kind [of study], and so was the Cappella Palatina.
SMITH: With Saint Cuthbert — and much of the material that you were working with
originally — aren't you dealing with a historical period that's extremely fragmented?
KITZINGER: Well, it's of course known as the Dark Ages, and they are dark
certainly insofar as information is concerned, relative to what happened before and
what happened later.

SMITH: But politically and culturally fragmented, with ruptures even in geographic
areas. I wonder, are there not problems in making continuities either geographically
or chronologically?

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KITZINGER: Yes, definitely. This is partly why these syntheses are built on weak
foundations always, because of this fragmentation, which is in the period itself. I
think I tried to say that a little in the introduction to Byzantine Art in the Making, the
fact that there is no proper term for that period from 300 to 800, as distinct from
what came before, the late antique, and what comes afterwards, Carolingian,
Ottonian, and then Romanesque, Gothic — these are all very definite periods with
definite identities. I had great trouble finding a title for that book due to the fact that
the period was very fragmented, both historically and art historically. People try to
get around it by extending the term "late antique" — Spatantike — into the sixth and
seventh century; but that's no longer antique to my mind.

SMITH: At least in the United States, the interwar period was one in which there
was a great interest in the Middle Ages, in an academic sense, and that's one of the
reasons why Focillon was brought over, and [Marcel] Aubert. Of course we see [the
influence of the Middle Ages] in the college architecture that was built in that period.
What was the state of the scholarship of the period, 300 to 800, that you've just
referred to? We could call it early medieval, but that doesn't seem right either.
KITZINGER: There was one book that was published by a German art historian, [R.
Komstedt], dealing essentially with Ravenna, which was called Vormittelalterliche
Malerei — Pre-medieval Painting. That I thought was at least accurate, so far as
terminology was concerned, but rather negative. So, as to the state of scholarship,

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there wasn't really very much, aside from the Morey school in Princeton of which I

spoke in a previous session. Komstedt's book came out I suppose in the late twenties,

and of course there was still the Strzygowski heritage from the earlier period,

although Strzygowski himself had gone off into impossible regions. But in Europe

there wasn't very much active scholarship in that [area], as distinct from Spatanlike,

which was all the rage, because it was a crisis period where the ancient world

collapsed, culturally and aesthetically. There were excavations and expeditions to

Middle-Eastern countries and so on. I'm not quite sure when Sedlmayr did his work

on the architecture of Saint Sophia. That was an attempt to come to grips with the

essence of that [later] period. But there wasn't really very much.

SMITH: I know there was French work on the Merovingians.

KITZINGER: Yes. And of course there were people working on miniatures. A

Focillon student, Loulou Micheli wrote a book on early miniature painting, mainly

pre-Carolingian. Another student of his was Francoise Henry, who became the

authority on early art in Ireland, both of whom I knew quite well. They often came to

London.

SMITH: Was the state of Byzantine studies better than the state of pre-Carolingian,

western European studies?

KITZINGER: You mean in art, or generally?

SMITH: In art, yes.

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KITZINGER: Well, architecture was always very important, and there was another
big monograph on Saint Sophia by a man called [G. A] Andreades, which was an
attempt to come to grips with the stylistic aspects of architecture.
SMITH: I'm asking these questions because I was wondering, when you started
working on the Cappella Palatina, what was the relationship of your work on that to
the previous literature on Byzantine art?

KITZINGER: My work was very much focused on mosaics. I never was an
architectural historian. Of course I was aware of the need to understand the
architectural surfaces on which the mosaics were placed, but architecture as such I
have never touched. In the field of mosaics there was a considerable amount of
literature in the general books on Byzantine art, of which there had been a great
number, particularly in France, in the early decades of the century. The Sicilian
mosaics, and the Venetian ones too for that matter, were simply treated as part of
Byzantine art. The question of how and why this pure Byzantine art was outside the
frontiers of the Byzantine empire was not raised in those books at all, I don't think.
So they were used to document and to trace the history both of iconography and style
in Byzantium, but a number of people, particularly in Italy, had tried to discern a local
Italian contribution in this, and this of course had also to do with the Italian mentality
of that time. So the question of Italian hands in this played a part in the writing on
these mosaics. There was one Russian scholar who was very important, and this was

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Viktor Lazarev, who had written a very basic article on the mosaics in one of
monuments, namely the cathedral of Cefalu. But the whole discussion, such as it was
at that time, was entirely in terms of who these artists were, whether they were really
Greeks or Italians.

In the preamble to my Cappella Palatina article, I pointed out that people
hadn't really asked why this pure Byzantine art was imported by the Norman rulers in
Sicily, who were Frenchmen by origin — except that they were originally Norsemen
from Scandinavia centuries before. So the why and wherefore of the importation had
not been raised. I remember at least one Italian scholar who wrote about these
mosaics afterwards, who accused me of having criticized the previous research. I
hadn't criticized it at all. I was just pointing out that it was one-sided, and it hadn't
brought out what I considered to be one of the essential aspects.
SMITH: What was the method that you then decided you needed to use in order to
resolve these questions of whether it was Italian art or Greek art, or why the Norman
kings would use this style?

KITZINGER: One thing was to read the historical sources, and what the texts
stemming from that period in Sicily itself actually said. There we get into the
situation that I spoke of in regard to [my work on] the Roman paintings, where I had
seen no link between what the historians were finding and what I was finding. This
was one of those situations where this gap began to be closed. There were texts, and

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one could see what went on in the patrons' minds in commissioning these works. So
the textual sources were one aspect. Another was a very careful and detailed
inventorying of the monuments themselves, comparing what one found with more or
less contemporary monuments in Byzantium itself, to see where they were the same
and where they differed — very much from the point of view of layout and
iconography rather than style. So all those elements that had been missing in my
puzzle started to come together there.

SMITH: In terms of the question ofKunstwollen with regard to these mosaics, isn't
the relationship of the artists who actually do the work to the royal authorities rather
complex?

KITZINGER: Yes, of course there we know very little. We know nothing about any
of the artists; it's all inference. There was one school of thought in Italy at that time
which claimed that those artists who were employed by the Norman kings came from
Venice, that the whole Sicilian mosaic production is an offshoot from Venice. You
couldn't disprove that by saying, "No, we know they came from Byzantium." We
don't. It's entirely a matter of inference from the objects themselves. So it's very hard
to talk about Kunstwollen there. Of course that is true in the case of Riegl's material
too, because he didn't have any artists either. In fact, the whole idea, I suppose, is
that you try to recreate the psyche of these people because you haven't got any solid
evidence.

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SMITH: But you're also recreating the psyche of the patrons.
KITZINGER: Yes, and you have a lot more there; that was one of the things that I
tried to do.

SMITH: But you don't know the degree to which they actually worried about the
images.

KITZINGER: No, and this is a thing I always get a little nervous about in art-
historical writing. It's very [common], not just in my field but everywhere, to say,
"Abbot Suger did" and "King Roger did," and we don't really know. With Suger we
know a little, because of course he wrote himself, and one knows what he
commissioned and so on, but with King Roger we have no idea what his own
personal input into this was, if any. I try and avoid that kind of phrasing. I'm not sure
I always did, but I've tried to because it's misleading. We just don't know.

One rather important textual source there was a Greek preacher, Philagathos,
whose true identity had just been discovered by a German scholar during the war
years. One knew that this was a rather important figure, a theologian who had close
connections with the Norman court. The texts of his homilies had been published,
although not critically published at that time, and I made extensive use of them. That
was really quite new and wouldn't have been possible if it hadn't been for this recent
identification. We know Philagathos had close links with the Norman court, so that
was a case where one could at least get somewhere near the thinking of people of that

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time. Then, after I had published my article, an Italian article appeared in which it

was cheerfully claimed that it was Philagathos who had planned the decoration of the

Cappella Palatina. Which is not impossible, but as I say, I was very careful not to say

anything like that.

SMITH: Were the primary sources that you used mostly published, or were you

dealing with manuscripts?

KITZINGER: No, this was all published.

SMITH: Would it have been possible to do the same work if you were dealing with

unpublished manuscript material?

KITZINGER: No, I couldn't have done it, because it would have taken me forever to

plow through one homily, [laughter]

SMITH: Yes, okay. So that kind of bibliographic or antiquarian work is very

important then for the kind of work that you would do. You mentioned the gaps in

knowledge of the subject, that at the time you knew very little about the liturgical

practices in Sicily, or about the architectural dating. Have later studies filled in any of

those questions?

KITZINGER: Just the other day I had a visit from a young lady who's now involved

with Sicilian material. She wanted from me evidence that in the churches of the Latin

rite founded by the Normans, services were held according to the Greek Orthodox

rite, and there's just no evidence of that at all. In my article on the Cappella Palatina I

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pointed out that there was this one area in the church which in a Greek church would
have been used for preparing the eucharist, and it has an arrangement of figures which
fits that Greek rite absolutely. It is very different from a Latin rite. In the Latin
church you don't make such a fuss over preparing the host as you do in the Greek.
But the only evidence are these mosaics themselves. It suggests that whoever did this
was certainly aware of the Greek rite, and may have had in mind that the church
would occasionally be used for that. So this girl, who is now much more deeply into
this than I was, is still writing about the same thing, fifty years later.
SMITH: This article certainly takes you much deeper into the question of the
relationship of artistic form and content to politics. How far did you think that the
model that you developed there could be generalized to other studies of the period?
KITZINGER: I think the method has been followed by others, using the architectural
arrangements, the relationship of the images to the architecture, and the placing of
things. In that sense this has had a certain influence, yes, and of course the influence
of patrons was something that was very much in the air in the forties. Of course
you've talked to Francis Haskell. Although at that point I wasn't aware that
patronage studies were being done for totally different periods of art history.
SMITH: But of course Haskell is dealing with patrons for whom there are actual
papers; you know when they bought something and for how much.
KITZINGER: I always envied that, except that I feel sometimes people who are

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working in the nineteenth and twentieth century have too much material, and I have
just the opposite problem. They have to pick and choose, or they lose their way in a
mass of [material]. Not Francis Haskell, but people are in danger of doing that.
SMITH: This may be an unfair question, so you can avoid it if you wish, but I wasn't
completely sure after reading your article why you were convinced that Byzantine
craftsmen were most likely the people who had done the mosaics. You seem to be
saying it was the choice of design and the work methods.

KITZINGER: Well, it was, primarily. Of course that article didn't really deal with
that; that was just what I was trying to get away from, because the previous literature
had been very much about who these people were, and I was much more concerned
with what was in the patron's mind in commissioning this. In the previous generation
it had been treated as just Byzantine art, so its general Byzantine character was not in
dispute, but my question was, what was in the patron's mind in doing this, rather than
who the actual artists were.

I did get into the latter problem extensively later, in a book on the mosaics of
another church at Palermo, Saint Mary's of the Admiral [The Mosaics of St. Mary's of
the Admiral in Palermo], which didn't come out until 1990. A key point in that book
is the actual stylistic relationship to things which are indisputably Byzantine. The
earliest mosaics in the Cappella Palatina, in the dome, are very close relations — and I
wasn't the first one to point that out — to mosaics in Saint Sophia. In fact, the closest

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stylistic parallels are there. If art-historical method and stylistic analysis means
anything, then this is a case where we know the source from which these artists came.
On the negative side, there's absolutely no evidence of anything previously having
been done of that kind in Sicily. There was a sort of romantic school, going back to
the nineteenth century, in Sicily, which of course had its Greek connection from the
B.C. period on, and certainly again when it was part of the Byzantine empire under
Justinian. There was this rather romantic idea that there was an underground survival
of Byzantine culture and art through the two centuries and more of Arab occupation,
and then it re-emerged under the Normans, so there was this school of thought that
there was a native tradition out of which this came. There was not a shred of proof of
this, and I think nobody now believes that mosaics like these were made in Sicily in
the tenth and eleventh centuries. So it was a new departure, that I think everybody
agrees. I think most people also agree that these people came from Byzantium and
not from Venice.

SMITH: In terms of what you were trying to do in this article, how does art history
change or shape the view of the political and social history of the Norman kingdom of
Sicily? What does the art say about the society, about the politics and the ideology,
that nothing else says?

KITZINGER: I wouldn't say "that nothing else says," but [in this case] it makes it
very clear that it's focused on the monarch, on the ruler. This also emerges from

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other sources, but it's such tangible evidence of that; it shows that this whole Norman
political establishment in southern Italy and Sicily was almost from the beginning
doomed to failure because it didn't have a broad base socially. They accumulated an
enormous amount of wealth, hence all this display. But it was all the monarchy itself,
and its establishment. It has been defined as a protoabsolutism, which it was. This
was very different from what happened during the same period on the Italian
mainland, particularly in the north Italian areas where the communes developed, and
commerce — the middle class. That didn't exist in Sicily. It was entirely the
monarchy, and the monuments expressed this. One of the main points in that article is
this actual physical concentration on the person of the king in his loge; they used this
iconography to focus on the king.

SMITH: I'll probably be coming back to this question again, but there's a later article
that you wrote, "On the Interpretation of Stylistic Changes in Late Antique Art,"
where you say that we don't need the column of Marcus Aurelius to know that society
was becoming more rigid; the evidence for that was everywhere else.
KITZINGER: This is true a little in this case too. I don't want to lose the thread, but
I think there is perhaps a useful way of getting at it. I should mention three people
whose work had a great influence on what I was doing with the Cappella Palatina.
One was Andre Grabar, whose book on the emperor in Byzantine art had come out in
the thirties. He had [presented] a framework for understanding monarchic art in

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Byzantine terms, and therefore established the background to what I was trying to do
with these Norman things.

Another was Andreas Alfoldi, a Hungarian scholar. He was originally a
numismatist, deeply involved with the whole archaeology of the Roman empire. He
had left Hungary and worked in Switzerland, then came to the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton. In the thirties he had written two absolutely basic articles on the
monarchic ceremonial under the Roman emperors in the second, third, and fourth
centuries. So he had established the same sort of [framework] and it actually
preceded Grabar. In a sense, Grabar probably would not have been possible without
him. Alfoldi was probably the pioneer in this, but doing it with another monarchy.
So there were two monarchies that preceded mine in time, and both had been dealt
with in masterly fashion.

The third one was Ernst Kantorowicz, who was an historian who I got to
know well in the fifties. In the early twenties he wrote a classic book on the emperor
Frederick II. Frederick was actually the grandson of Roger II, the son of Roger's
daughter Constanza. In other words, this thirteenth-century phenomenon of an
absolutely outstanding monarch had its roots in this twelfth-century situation in
southern Italy. I don't know how much you know about Kantorowicz.
SMITH: I know the book, I've read it, and he's entered into a lot of interviews.
KITZINGER: Of course we talked about Stefan George, and Kantorowicz was a

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"Georgian" if ever there was one. His whole work on Frederick II was an apotheosis
of the great individual hero, and he came to regret this [notion], particularly because it
had been exploited by the Nazis. A lot of his later work was actually concerned with
the Normans. One could say that he himself was "dethroning" Frederick somewhat
by laying bare Norman antecedents to what Frederick stood for.
[Tape VII, Side Two]

KITZINGER: In a very concrete way, all three [of these men] had dealt with one
aspect of imperial art, namely the adventus, the ruler's arrival as a ceremonial event in
a city. Adventus was an important thing; when the Roman emperor returned from a
campaign, he was received in triumph. The same was true in Byzantium. For both
Alfoldi and Grabar it was a crucial subject.

Kantorowicz, although a historian, had also done important work on certain
monuments, including the wooden door of Santa Sabina in Rome, a fifth-century
sculpted door with some puzzling scenes. He had interpreted one of them as the
king's advent, in this case, Christ's. In all his work there is this back and forth
between Christ and the ruler, between secular — although of course at that time it
wasn't really secular — and religious iconography. Kantorowicz's article on the king's
advent appeared in the Art Bulletin long before mine, and of course I had read that.

The crucial [moment] came one morning when I was on my first trip to Sicily,
in the summer of '49. I was sent there by Dumbarton Oaks to explore the possibilities

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of doing what Friend had in mind, namely a comprehensive corpus of the mosaics. It
just suddenly dawned on me, standing in the Cappella Palatina, that in these mosaics
great prominence was given to adventus scenes. And that then became crucial for
this article. So it shows to what extent it was the result of what other people had
done before, and how much of this was in the air too.

SMITH: I will be coming back to this question of what art history has to contribute.
Obviously your work stands on social and political history, but at the same time art
history has something perhaps to reveal —

KITZINGER: Yes. Sorry, I'd lost the thread there because you asked about my
article on the interpretation of style. What does the art tell us that we don't already
know? I think that is a problem. Kantorowicz wrote a book on the hudes regiae,
which are the ceremonial acclamations of the ruler in church services. We have texts
of the Norman period in which the ruler is acclaimed, and Kantorowicz was able to
show how excessive the concentration on the ruler became in this secular Norman
liturgy. That certainly was extremely important, and also makes you wonder, "Well,
what did I say that wasn't already known from what Kantorowicz had done with the
liturgy?" One could answer that the very fact that the same mentality manifests itself
visually that had manifested itself textually is in itself of significance, because in
certain cultures that wouldn't have happened.
SMITH: And you can no longer look at those mosaics as Byzantine, also.

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KITZINGER: No.

SMITH: Which is perhaps equally important. I noticed also that the structure of the
article in part rests upon your posing a dialectic between the courtly and the spiritual.
And again, in terms of your own process of analysis, is that part of how you look at
things — setting up these conceptual dialectics that allow you to define the characters?
KITZINGER: Yes, but it's not really consciously in my mind a dialectical process. I
do try to reconcile these aspects, but not really consciously as a dialectic. In my own
work, I think dialectics plays much more of a role in diachronic studies rather than in
monographic studies.

SMITH: The next article I wanted to talk about was "The Cult of Images in the Age
Before Iconoclasm." Could you place that article in relationship to the then existing
literature?

KITZINGER: Perhaps I should start autobiographically by pointing out that this
whole interest developed out of Nikolaus Pevsner's trip to America in '49 to recruit
various scholars as authors for individual volumes in the Pelican History of Art series.
He had allocated two volumes to early Christian and Byzantine art, and he
commissioned these from Richard Krautheimer and myself — Krautheimer for
architecture, and I for the other arts. I signed a contract for this, and the first thing
that happened was that when Richard and I got together and tried to work out some
sort of a layout for this, we realized we couldn't agree even on the broad divisions of

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periods. It was all very friendly, but we went through a "divorce," and decided it had
to be one volume for architecture, and one volume for the other arts. So we
communicated that to Pevsner, who was quite willing to accept that. From there
on — it must have been around 1950, while I was already quite deeply into Sicily — I
had this task ahead of me of writing a book on the pictorial arts from the beginnings
of Christian art to the end of Byzantium in the fifteenth century.

I soon realized I was having great difficulties with this, and I kept on putting it
off, but I was always thinking about it. I then decided that I would have to have some
sort of focus. And the focus, if you take this whole twelve-, thirteen-hundred-year
span, to me was the icon, the cult image. I'm trying to get an exact chronology on
this. Of course this once again had something to do with Friend and his interests,
particularly in theology and the role of the image in relation to Christology and in
relation to Byzantine religious thought. I remember when I was at Dumbarton Oaks,
just picking up a volume from the Loeb series of classical texts, of a second-century
Christian author, [Marcus] Minucius Felix, whom you may not have heard of.
SMITH: No.

KITZINGER: He wrote a dialogue modeled on the Platonic dialogues, called
Octavius. He has an educated Christian walking with a pagan friend on the beaches
at Ostia I think, discussing Christianity. It's an early apologetic text. There's a whole
corpus of what's called apologetic literature — Christians defending their new faith vis-

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a-vis the non-Christian world. Felix was a highly cultured man, and his text has
importance within the study of early Christian culture partly because he was so
intellectually high class. There's a beautiful passage in which he points out that
pagans accuse Christians of having no temples or images, no tangible ways of
worship, and he defends this concept of worship entirely by internal, spiritual means.

This sort of crystallized in my mind the problem that I was having, starting
without images. Finding that passage was a kind of catalyst to seeing how I would
get from a totally un-iconic period to a situation where the image was absolutely
essential, as it was in Byzantium later. And that then involved reading on how this all
came about, partly on a theoretical level — why did later writers no longer adopt this
purely spiritual ideal? — and partly on what actually happened. How did Christian art
begin if that was the premise?

On the theoretical side, Friend was important because he had brought
theology into people's awareness at Dumbarton Oaks. But equally important, or
perhaps more important, was Andre Grabar, who had written a lot about the function
of images in Byzantium particularly. He had also already drawn attention to the fact
that an intensification of concern with religious images took place in the later part of
the sixth and the seventh centuries. So I started reading the theoretical writings that
involved images. In the iconoclastic period, and subsequently, an enormous amount
of defensive writing was being produced by the defenders of images. So there was a

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lot of literature there on the theoretical side.

On the other hand, I was trying to find out as much as possible about the use
of religious images. From this it became clear very soon that this period following
Justinian, the late sixth century and the seventh century, were extremely important;
that's when people really began to invoke images as a help in their troubles, and of
course there is a likely connection with the political situation of that period — the
breakup of the Justinianic empire. I got into all these questions, and on the actual art
side it brought me back also to the period with which my thesis had been concerned,
so in this study everything came together, really: my earlier concern with the art of
that period, the political and social conditions, and the theory — what people were
thinking and writing.

I decided to do this in two stages. One article would cover only the textual
evidence; that's where this "Cult of Images" came from. Then I was planning a
second article in which the reflection of all this in art would be the subject. I did a
preliminary essay, actually, in a festschrift for Friend ["On Some Icons of the Seventh
Century," Late Classical and Mediaeval Studies in Honor of Albert Mathias Friend,
Jr.], which came out in '55, in which I [focused] on some early icons. It was to me a
kind of curious provocation of Friend in that I concentrated there very much on what
the developments that interested him — religious life and so on — meant in actual style
and actual art, which he wasn't interested in at all. [laughter] That article was very

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important to me as a kind of reminder to him of where we differed.

But the first part, as I say, was entirely concerned with texts. At some point I
was getting help with the typing of this, and I don't know how this situation arose, but
Friend was walking through the room where I was dictating from my notes to the
typist, and I remember him saying afterwards, "Well, all the right names came up."
There was Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and Theodore the Studite — all the
theologians that were involved in this — and Friend was delighted that I, this man with
a totally different art-historical background, had absorbed all this and was now
regurgitating it. [laughter] So that is the background of this article, and it was the
only larger thing I've ever written without any illustrations, just solid text.
SMITH: In your conclusion you talk about the effects that this must have had on the
artist, to become the revealer of divine power, I suppose. I wondered to what degree
was that not already a part of classical Greek art?

KITZINGER: Oh sure, yes, and of course there I really got to the realization of what
had been bothering me ever since my early days in Rome, when I couldn't find a link
between what I was seeing in these paintings and what historians had written about
Rome in that period. But here, by focusing on this, everything came together: the
patron, obviously, who commissioned the thing, and the people who actually made
use of these images. It was not provable, but surely a reasonable assumption [could
be made] that the artist knew what he was doing, knew whom he was catering to, and

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he was making these images to which people were then praying.

So this linkage that I had always looked for came through here, and I still
believe that certainly the artist must have been conscious of what his product was
going to be used for. He was himself part of this society, so the artist and the public
came into it. That was the one point where I came closest to Ernst Gombrich,
because he always had this credo that form follows function. In this case I thought I
had defined the function, and I was looking for the form that corresponded to it by
focusing on the same period in stylistic terms.

SMITH: This is a minor question, but Weitzmann, for instance, questioned whether
Christian churches were devoid of art, and he pointed to Dura-Europos as evidence
that there must have been murals in Christian churches at a very early point.
KITZINGER: Well, yes, from the early third century on. The un-iconic period ends
around 200, and the Dura baptistery with its paintings is about 240. It's the turn from
the second to the third century that is crucial, and that's not new in Dura; the Roman
catacombs told us that long ago. When I first became interested in these things, in the
early thirties, there were still people who claimed that these catacomb paintings
started in the first century. I don't think anyone believes that anymore; it's generally
agreed that they begin around 200. So there is an un-iconic period which
corresponds very much to the period of the early apologists; the only thing is that the
apologists still kept on saying "we have no images" at a time when there already were

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a lot of images — practice precedes theory.

Weitzmann was interested in the synagogue in Dura because of his belief in a
Jewish pictorial art starting way back in the Hellenistic period. Certainly Dura in a
way provides the strongest arguments in favor of this thesis, because you have within
a few blocks of each other, in the same town, a Christian cult building and a
synagogue — roughly contemporary, around 240 — and the paintings in the synagogue
are far more elaborate and far richer, and far more impressive than those in the
Christian building. So certainly in terms of Dura, the Jews had a head start. So
there's no disagreement there. But I think the attempt to trace Jewish pictorial art
back into the period B.C. is problematic.

The Dura Christian paintings are in part very similar, in subject matter and
manner of representation, to the paintings in the Roman catacombs. This is
remarkable when you [realize] they are thousands of miles apart. In both cases, I
think, it's a very clear beginning, almost a stammering, of working against a
background of opposition to images. That was always to me one of the main interests
in this earliest Christian art, that it was produced in the teeth of opposition to any kind
of pictorial art.

SMITH: The next article which I wanted to discuss is the "Byzantine Art in the
Period between Justinian and Iconoclasm," which I presume is the continuation.
KITZINGER: Yes, the article in the Friend volume was a first attempt to formulate

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what happened in art on the basis of the evidence for the intensification of cult
practices in this post-Justinianic period. Dumbarton Oaks has an annual symposium,
and in 1957 the subject of the symposium was the seventh century. I organized and
directed that, and the whole idea was to show what a critical period this was in every
way: economically, socially, militarily, and artistically. I gave a paper there in which
I discussed the stylistic and artistic aspects of the rise of the cult of images. Then I
didn't publish that because I was asked to contribute a paper to the international
Byzantine congress, which took place in Munich in '58. I elaborated the symposium
paper and it became a paper at this congress. That's why it wasn't published until '58.
But it followed right on the paper on the cult of images.

SMITH: One of its subtexts is the debate over the so-called Macedonian renaissance.
KITZINGER: Yes, this was always a kind of bone of contention between Weitzmann
and myself, his to my mind overemphasizing the innovation in the Macedonian period.
As I was getting into the period just before iconoclasm, I could see how much of
what happened in the ninth and tenth centuries had been prepared during this time.
You have to realize that when you look at the old handbooks, the seventh and eighth
centuries are a total void. You had a first great climax under Justinian, and there
were all these world-famous monuments like Saint Sophia and San Vitale in Ravenna,
and then you had these in their own way quite glamorous monuments — primarily
illuminated manuscripts — of the Macedonian period, and in between there was

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nothing. You can look even at relatively recent handbooks; they sort of slur over this
period and try to get as quickly as possible to iconoclasm, because then you don't
expect any images anymore.

My whole point there — having become convinced of the extraordinary
importance of this period in terms of religious life — was to focus equally then on the
artistic manifestations of this. I don't feel that I have exactly created another period in
Byzantine art history, but certainly I've done what I could to focus on this
intermediate period, the second half of the sixth, and the seventh century, because I
think the breakup of Justinianic art starts in the later part of Justinian's own reign [and
continues] to the early eighth century, when iconoclasm starts.
SMITH: At the time you wrote this article, or as you were developing it, what was
the thinking on the relationship of Byzantium to the provinces and its effects on the
art? As I recall, in your British Museum book you suggest that possibly the changes
came from provincial art coming into the center.

KITZINGER: I think I mentioned earlier, when we talked about Morey, that for
Morey, Byzantium didn't exist; it was always the provinces. He was playing off the
Asiatic provinces versus Egypt. To Morey it was only after the end of the
iconoclastic period that Byzantium came in at all. When I wrote my British Museum
book, that was very much the general thinking. Of course people like Strzygowski
had previously paid a lot of attention to Syria. And in what then became this Munich

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paper, I probably deemphasized the provinces too much and gave Constantinople too
much of a role. But I certainly believe that Constantinople was and remained a kind
of conservatory for those currents that Morey had called Alexandrian, namely an
essential Hellenism; it had preserved a lot of that through these centuries. That's
where my disagreement with Weitzmann's concept of the Macedonian renaissance
also comes in, because I feel a lot of this had survived. Where we don't know this is
during iconoclasm itself. But secular art was not prohibited — on the contrary it was
encouraged during the iconoclastic period — and secular art was always a kind of a
carrier of the ancient traditions. I think a revival in the Macedonian period certainly
took place, there's no question, in terms of quantity and quality, but it had a good
foundation in Byzantium itself in the preceding centuries. And so that was one of the
essential elements, but the other essential element was the anticlassical current that
was in conflict with it. We've talked about this whole period being difficult to
encapsulate in a single term, but it's particularly true of the seventh century — it's just
chaos.

SMITH: Aren't you also suggesting that the abstract, or the nonclassical art forms
are not necessarily provincial in origin? Or am I misreading the article in that sense?
As you set up this Hellenistic/abstract duality, are you not suggesting that they're both
in play in the capital?
KITZINGER: Yes, definitely, very much so.

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SMITH: And perhaps even by the same artists, but for different purposes?
KITZINGER: Yes, and this is another thing that came in there, this deliberate choice
of styles. I, myself, and some of my students used the concept of the "iconography of
style," meaning that style has an iconographic message in itself. This is something I
very strongly believe in, and the idea of "modes" then comes out of that; the artist
deliberately varies his style depending on what he's doing or what subject he has. So
style is not just a spontaneous and involuntary expression of the artist's personality,
but is to some extent dictated by the subject.
SMITH: Yes, and expectations then.

KITZINGER: And expectations. All this came together in this work on the cult of
images, so in a sense it was the resolution of the problems that had bothered me since
my earliest days in Rome. It was so useful because there was so much literature, and
that was thanks to iconoclasm — both the enemies of the images, and particularly the
friends of the images, kept on writing. So it was an ideal situation.
SMITH: I notice that you use Santa Maria Antiqua as evidence, so you are clearly
trying to integrate everything.

KITZINGER: Yes, the things that I had worked on at the very beginning, I brought
in again, so it was very satisfying in that sense. At the same time, because of Sicily, I
had gone somewhat beyond the rather narrow period with which most of my work
had been concerned.

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SMITH: You said the other day that you didn't return to Germany until '58, so the
Munich trip was your first visit back. Was that a conscious decision not to go back to
Germany?

KITZINGER: Well, yes. I had, and in some cases still have, trouble with Germans,
particularly people of my own generation and older. Not knowing what they did,
how they behaved and so on, I just didn't want to meet them. Of course a lot of
people were in a similar [situation], and others had far less of a problem with it. As I
say, staying away was one way of coping, or not coping with it. But then this
congress was organized, and being the scholarly head of the major Byzantine
institution in America, I couldn't very well say I wouldn't attend for personal reasons.
Having been asked to do one of the commissioned main papers for the plenary
sessions, I had to go. A lot of time had elapsed by then, and we were well into the
Adenauer period. It was an international framework — that was very important to me.
It happened to be in my home town, but that was pure accident; I was going to an
international congress. I took my wife and our older son with me, more or less as a
kind of personal protection.

SMITH: Did you deliver your paper in German or English? It was written in
English, I assume.

KITZINGER: It was written in English. The papers were distributed ahead of time,
and people were supposed to have read them. You didn't read your paper at all; it

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was all discussion (in German).

SMITH: Did you find Germany had changed? Of course it had changed, but was it

very evident?

KITZINGER: Well, the whole thing was a very strong emotional experience. The

strongest one, thinking back to this visit from my own point of view, was walking

through the part of town where I had grown up, finding things that I hadn't thought of

for all these years. To go back to your childhood — just [simple] things like seeing a

low wall on which you had walked, trying to keep your balance, that had survived,

unscathed.

[Tape VIII, Side One]

KITZINGER: Of course there was a lot of destruction, but to me the strongest

impressions were the things that hadn't changed at all. It brought back my whole

childhood to me in a very tangible way. I saw myself at a much earlier age. So it was

a major emotional experience, but far more governed by what had not changed than

by what had changed. Of course the visit was too short. Except for walking around a

bit in those streets, all [of my time was spent] at the university in an international

group, so there was very little contact with the people there.

[interruption for lunch]

SMITH: We were wrapping up your first trip to Munich and your response to it.

KITZINGER: Yes. Perhaps, in order not to leave too many loose ends, I should say

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more about the Pelican History of Art.
SMITH: Yes.

KITZINGER: As I say, it was that [project] that made me formulate my ideas about
the origins and development of Byzantine art, and that's what then led to this focus on
the seventh and eighth centuries as a really unknown period. So this is what I owe to
Pevsner, but I then realized I was never going to write this book, so it must have been
around this period that our correspondence became increasingly strained. I got very
irritated with him. He of course had enormous achievements to his credit, but for his
authors in these various categories it wasn't easy. Pevsner managed his many
activities by keeping them totally separate. The summer was the only time when I
might occasionally be in this country to talk to him, and he was always off doing his
Buildings of England, and he would do nothing else, so you could never talk to him.

I knew him quite well, but this became more and more difficult, and it must
have been around '58 that I finally told him I couldn't do it. I suggested John
Beckwith to him, who was at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He had done a lot of
work on early ivories. I said, "If you want to have something done quickly, ask John
Beckwith." He did write it very quickly, and it's not one of the successful volumes.
So that was the end of the [Pelican story]. I just thought I'd mention that because
otherwise it would be a loose end.
SMITH: You avoided until actually rather late, until the seventies, writing a synthetic

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[study].

KITZINGER: Yes, I realized that I wanted to [do this], but on my own terms. I
couldn't do it in this sort of handbook way of covering all the monuments equally. I
could only give the picture that I had arrived at. I had a concrete situation, namely
the invitation to give the Slade Lectures in Cambridge, England, and so I then decided
I would make this the subject for them. So that was a belated outcome of the Pelican
History of Art.

SMITH: Your next book was The Mosaics ofMonreale, which I wasn't able to look
at because it was checked out, but there you returned to your Sicilian subject matter.
KITZINGER: That also was a commission. The archbishop ofMonreale decided to
have a trilogy on his cathedral. One volume on the architecture, one on the mosaics,
and one on the cloister. Do you know Monreale?
SMITH: No, I don't

KITZINGER: It has one of the great cloisters, with four porticoes, a very elaborate
series of columns, and capitals with carvings. The cloister ofMonreale is a famous
monument that has its own volume within this trilogy. Having become known, I
suppose, through my work on the Cappella Palatina, and having got to know a lot of
people in Sicily as a result of that, I then was asked to do the mosaics. Again, it was
a case of concentrating on one monument and trying to branch out from it. But there
I was very much governed by the aesthetic impressions that I had had. It's a very

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impressive interior. I've never forgotten the first time I entered it, what an
extraordinarily well-planned and consistently executed decoration this was. So the
key thing there was to me the style, the purely artistic side of it.

One of the very interesting aspects of this decoration is that it was done within
thirty years of the decoration of the Cappella Palatina, and in part repeats the same
program. This is not such a common occurrence in the history of art. You do have
other cases: I always think of the column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome as based on
the column of Trajan of sixty years earlier, both being very similar and yet different.
So there are such cases where the ensuing generation in the same place copies its
predecessor, not trying to be innovative in that sense, and yet departing from it. That
to me became a very interesting aspect of the Monreale decoration, because among
the cycles of mosaics there are two that are quite obviously based on the Cappella
Palatina, namely the Old Testament cycle in the nave, and the cycle of the lives of
Saints Peter and Paul, which in the Palatina is in the aisles, and in Monreale — which is
a much bigger building, about twice the length — was put in two side chapels on either
side of the apse. So you have essentially the same iconography, but in a totally
different style.

When I got involved in this Sicilian material, Otto Demus's book on the
mosaics of Norman Sicily had appeared, a big and absolutely fundamental book. It
was the first really comprehensive and detailed presentation of all these monuments.

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It appeared in the same year as my Cappella Palatina article, 1949, but his work was
prewar. He had spent very little time in Sicily, but it was a detailed analysis of all
these decorations. When I wrote my Palatina article his book was in proof, it hadn't
come out yet. Demus let me read the proof, and I was able to argue with him, so he
was very generous there, and I acknowledged that in the article. But there was this
one seemingly secondary point which to me became quite crucial, which was that he
thought the artists of Monreale had not based their designs for these two cycles of
scenes that are so similar to the Palatina on the Palatina itself, but on miniature
models from the same school, translated into a totally new style. This thesis I found
basically implausible. These two churches are only about five miles apart, physically,
and the idea that these later artists hadn't looked at the earlier [work] at all and simply
happened to get similar miniature models to project on the walls was to me most
unlikely.

Of course this was very much the way people thought; Weitzmann's whole
life's work is derived from the history of texts — one set of miniatures is based on a
preceding set of miniatures, and so on, and you have this pedigree of derivation, so
the idea always was that any group of artists who were commissioned to do a cycle of
mural images had to have a miniature model. If two mural cycles were related it was
because they had related models, so there was always this idea of the dominance of
the miniature model. This certainly was the [viewpoint] in the early decades of the

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century, and Weitzmann maintained that [assertion] all his life.

Demus's explanation of these decorations came out of that [tradition]. His
great forte was that he had a very good eye and saw stylistic similarities and
differences and was able to articulate them both in German and in English. His
English was very good, and he very often found just the right word to characterize a
style. He really introduced an appreciation of the late twelfth-century style as an
innovative phase in Byzantium. He thought that there had been a set of miniatures
done in this new style but preserving the traditional iconography, and that was the
model then for the muralists at Monreale.

The key point in my discussion was to try to show that these people had
actually looked at the nearby mosaics and must have had sketches or copies and
translated them into this totally new style. So what you have there is a rare case,
certainly in earlier medieval art, where you can measure exactly the departure from
your model, which in Demus's case you couldn't. My premise that these people had
actually looked at those earlier mosaics, had sketches of them, and translated them
into this new style, made their achievement measurable.
SMITH: Were they the originators of this new style?

KITZINGER: They were Byzantines. We talked earlier about instances where from
simply stylistic comparison you [could] show where the artist came from, and that
was really the great merit of Demus. He showed that there was a new style that had

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evolved that you could demonstrate both in miniatures and also in monumental art, in
mosaics and frescoes, in Byzantium itself, and this then became known as the late
Comnenian — the Comnenes were the dynasty of that period. In their last phase, the
1 1 70s to 1 1 80s, this late Comnenian style emerged in Byzantium. How that emerged
is a good question, and still in great part unsolved.
SMITH: Or why it emerged? Was there a political subtext to it?
KITZINGER: Well, this is always there, but the interpretation of stylistic
change — how do you account for it? In this case I think you can say there was an
effort at a new sort of expressiveness. It's a very lively style, and you can compare it
to things that happen in rhetoric: emphasis, repetition. Increased effect on the
beholder — surely if you want to apply the Kunstwollen theory, that was the
psychological background to this. But this is speculation. Anyway, it is quite clear,
and I think everybody accepted that these artists were imported to do the work at
Monreale and they came from Byzantium. They didn't necessarily come from
Constantinople, but certainly from the heartland of the Byzantine empire. Demus was
still very much in the frame of mind that Byzantine artists were kind of aristocrats and
superior and they looked down on anything western; they had their own [approach]
and they were then imitated by people in the West. But in my account, and you see
this is why this difference became so basic, these imported artists were made to follow
a local model and comply with a local tradition. This was what to me made the

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Monreale phenomenon so interesting; you had these foreigners coming in, having to

come to terms with a pre-exist ent local tradition, and making out of this a really

extraordinarily harmonious and organic whole.

SMITH: That would suggest that the content of the murals was foreign to their work

tradition.

KITZINGER: To me it is quite clear that they were not really all that interested in

content. The Cappella Palatina is just packed with message and political ideology.

Monreale is twice the size — vast but with no tension, and no evident message. Do

you know Eve Borsook?

SMITH: No.

KITZINGER: She's a Californian whose base is really in Florence — mainly

fourteenth-, fifteenth-century painting. In the early seventies she became interested in

the art of Norman Sicily. It was an unfortunate situation because she heard that we

were preparing a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks on the art of Norman Sicily, and she

thought it was like a congress where you submit a paper and it gets included in the

program, but these symposia were always seven or eight speakers, handpicked, so by

the time I heard of her interest in this it was already sewn up and there was just no

way of [including her].

Her idea at that point was that the art, particularly in the period of Roger II,
expressed his claim to the Latin kingdom in the Holy Land. According to many

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people this was not really of great interest to Roger at all, but Borsook tried to find it
expressed in the mosaics. There are some things which clearly have to do with
Jerusalem, but not really to a great extent. Anyway, we got off on the wrong foot
there because I had to [inform] her regretfully that she couldn't be given a slot in the
program of the symposium.

I've never actually met her to this day, but she then wrote a book called
Messages in Mosaic, in which she gave her ideas of the political-religious content of
these mosaics. She did more or less what I had done for the Cappella Palatina, but
her main focus was Monreale, and to her Monreale was and still is the absolute
fulfillment of the Normans' political credo. I think in this respect it's a dilution. The
aesthetic harmony and unity of the mosaics is what mattered most to these people,
much more than content. There is a throne for the king on the north side, which was
apparently the conventional side for the king to be seated, but there's no way you can
say that the program was focused on the king at all. It's all much too big; it's an
enormous church, and so I think the whole thing was very much for show, really, very
interesting artistically, and enormously fascinating, but not from the point of view of
messages. So there's a total disagreement there.

SMITH: Is there reason to believe that the Byzantine artists may have been
unconcerned with content in general, and more concerned about the stylistic and the
technical?

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KITZINGER: I think it's always very dangerous with any medieval artist, not only in
the figurative arts but also in literature, to assume that he was not interested in
religion. I think it's just too much part of the medieval human being. So I think they
knew exactly what they were doing. * [In a paper which I wrote for a conference in
Rome a few years ago and which has now been published, I showed that there are
certain features in the Monreale mosaics reflecting what were then quite recent
developments in Byzantine religious iconography]

SMITH: But the visual style could be the religious expression and the specific
content is irrelevant to them, but relevant to the patrons.

KITZINGER: I would say any message that a cycle of the life of Christ like that in
Monreale, which is very extensive, inevitably produces, the artist certainly knew, but
his own interests may have been primarily aesthetic, and I think that's the whole point
of Monreale. There is a very monumental nineteenth-century publication on
Monreale by a man called [Domenico] Gravina. It only exists at the British Museum;
it doesn't exist here in Oxford. It always requires two people to lift it. It has to be
brought in from the stacks on a cart — an unwieldy, impossible publication. But it
reproduces in lithographs every mosaic at Monreale. So it was fully published. I've
lost my thought . . . you asked me about Monreale. How did I get onto Gravina?
SMITH: Well I was asking you about whether the aesthetic form is actually for the

*Kitzinger added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

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artist the content rather than the specific message.

KITZINGER: The whole iconography is there, in Monreale, and it's completely
orthodox; it's all as it should be, and the artists certainly understood it, but any
messages there might be are so diluted that it's really not very important. We don't
know what went on in these people's minds, it's all guesswork, in a way. Certainly
one thing about the Palatina is that it has all these inscriptions, which in a way spell
out what the message was, and there was none of this at Monreale — practically no
inscriptions at all, other than labels for the individual mosaics and texts that the
prophets carried from their own writings. So it's a totally different kind of monument.
Architecturally it is a Western-type, highly elongated basilica, but it's in spirit much
closer to real Byzantium.

This notion that William II was really twisting the Byzantine [iconography] for
his own purposes isn't true; he just adapts it to an un-Byzantine architecture. In my
book I was so convinced about the fullness of the understanding at Monreale of
Byzantine art aesthetically — and also in not putting all these messages in but letting it
stand by itself — that I put forward the idea that behind the entire project there must
have been one mastermind, and I tentatively suggest that this mastermind was Greek.
The decoration fits the architecture perfectly, which it certainly doesn't do in the
Palatina, and even less in Cefalu, which is a Norman transalpine architecture with
Byzantine mosaics imposed on it and forced into it, and not agreeing. In Monreale it's

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just the opposite; it's absolute harmony. The mosaic decoration really fits into the
architecture. Since this mastermind understood the Byzantine function of the image
so completely, I put forward the idea that he was a Greek.

It was just one paragraph, and it was meant to be provocative, because one of
the things that always bothered me and still bothers me a lot is this division that has
existed in scholarship ever since the nineteenth century: people who deal with
architecture don't deal with the decoration and vice versa. What one so often asks
oneself is whether the man who designed the architecture already had the decoration
in mind. And very often this is uncertain. In the case of French cathedral
architecture, where the sculpture is part of the architecture, you can assume that it
was envisaged from the beginning. But in the case of painted decorations this is very
often uncertain and very rarely asked. Even for key monuments of Byzantine mosaic
decoration, people never ask whether the architecture was designed for that particular
decoration, or whether the decoration was just imposed on it, or devised for it
subsequently.

So I felt by putting forward this idea that there was one mastermind I at least
was drawing attention to this problem: did the architect know that there was going to
be all this decoration? In my opinion he definitely did. Whether he was a Greek or a
Westerner was a secondary question, and I was very deliberately provocative by
saying that he could have been a Greek. I quoted an example from a much later

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period, the Italian architect, [Aristotile] Fioravanti, who was called to Moscow in the
fifteenth century to build the Kremlin wall and a church in the traditional Byzantine
style. This was after the Tartar invasion in Russia and an attempt in the fifteenth
century to revive pre-Mongol architecture. So Fioravanti designed this church in the
traditional pre-Mongol Russian style, which is essentially the Byzantine style, and then
the wall around the Kremlin, which could be in Milan. The famous wall, with the
Lenin tomb and all that, is Italian architecture. I cited the Kremlin church as an
example of a foreign artist being made to follow a local model. I thought this could
have happened in the case of Monreale. This one paragraph is still quoted as a totally
impossible, crazy idea, but I think it at least drew attention to this neglected question
of whether the architect knew there was going to be a decoration and what the
decoration was going to be like.

This book was published in 1960, and about five years later it became
necessary to do a lot of restoration work in Monreale because they had termites in the
wooden roof, and all kinds of alarming symptoms of decay. The work was started
around '65 and it went on into the eighties. The whole operation took about
seventeen years. One of the discoveries was that on certain walls in certain parts of
the church, architectural changes were made; windows were walled up, for instance,
in order to accommodate the mosaics. This was then adduced against me as proof
that the architect didn't envisage the mosaics. I still maintain my position that these

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are only details. The architect didn't at first envisage the exact detail of every wall,
but that he knew there were going to be mosaics to me is still indisputable. The main
lines of the program were known to him, if he wasn't indeed the planner himself. But
this is one of the cases in my life where physical evidence was produced afterwards to
show that I was wrong.

Now I know how I got to Gravina. The archbishop of Monreale's idea was to
redo the Gravina book — tome, I can't call it a book — with color photography. When
I did my work in Sicily in the fifties, Italy was still in too much of a postwar situation,
and color photography was quite impossible. The illumination of the building and all
that would have been not feasible. So from the beginning I decided to do only black-
and-white photographs. But by 1960 it was possible to do photographs in color. The
archbishop looked at Gravina's old opus, saw there were 102 plates covering the
entire decoration, and decided to do 102 plates reproducing exactly what Gravina had
done but in color photographs. I met the archbishop at that time when the book was
in preparation, and pointed out that this was not realistic. Now, in the 1990s, it is
possible to get quite good color reproduction of larger ensembles, but the only thing
that really worked out well at that time was details. So I told him (a) that a selection
would have to be made for color photography of details, and (b) some black and
white was needed also in order to illustrate larger ensembles, because that was the
whole point of the Monreale decoration, that it was such a unified thing. He agreed

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to both those changes. The result is that my book ended up with exactly the same
number of color plates as Gravina's (102), but details mostly. There are photographs
of larger groups, but they are all in black and white. But the [illustrations] were
supposed to be the kernel of the book, and the text was secondary. The whole thing
has the appearance of a coffee-table book. My text was in a way too learned, and in
some ways — it had these criticisms of Demus's theory — too specialized. So that's the
Monreale book.

SMITH: But certainly this book wasn't planned to be a coffee-table book, was it?
KITZINGER: Well, it was very expensive. I have a story about that. Mrs. Bliss still
came to Dumbarton Oaks a lot, until she became ill, a few years before she died. In
1960 she was still very much in evidence and would appear at tea. Dumbarton Oaks
preserved the Bliss tradition of a five o'clock tea in the afternoon; it was a way of
maintaining some sort of social contact within the institution. When Mrs. Bliss
appeared, of course she kind of predominated, and at one of these teas she told me
that she had been to a bookshop in New York to find a present for a friend who was
having her seventieth birthday. And she said, "What did I see? A book that you had
written, on Monreale. But do you know what they wanted me to pay for this?
Seventy dollars! I thought that was outrageous." How it happened that I hadn't
actually shown her the book when it came out, I don't know, but I evidently hadn't,
and I then thought to myself, "Well, if one of the richest women in the United States,

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trying to find a present for a dear friend, and passionately interested in Byzantium
herself, can't afford this book, how can anyone?" [laughter]

The book did indeed have very poor [sales]. Wittenborn was the bookseller in
New York. They promoted it in the States, and eventually it did sell out, but it had an
Italian edition as well as an English one, and the Italian one, in Italy, sold out much
more quickly. I felt it contained a lot of new work and new ideas which I thought
were important for an understanding of both Byzantine art and Sicilian art, so I tried
to get the publisher to do a paperback edition so that students could buy this, and to
this day this hasn't happened. In 1991 the same publisher in Palermo republished the
Italian edition. The whole thing was financed by the Bank of Sicily originally because
they have a fund for cultural endeavors. This new edition is indistinguishable from the
original, except they asked me to write a new introduction, which I did. So the book
is now available again, unless it's sold out. I saw it in an Italian bookseller's catalog
the other day.
[Tape VIII, Side Two]

KITZINGER: The cathedral of Monreale itself is poverty-stricken, and in Italy there
is a rule that banks have to devote one percent, or whatever it is, of their net profits to
cultural endeavors. You get a lot of publications by banks of artistic monuments, but
it does not make for wide distribution.
SMITH: Could you interest another publisher in doing a paperback edition, like

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Penguin?

KITZINGER: No, I think I once thought Abrams in New York was a possibility; I
can't remember what happened there. But first of all it would [require] the agreement
of the Sicilians to let it go. When I first came back to Palermo, after this book was
published, I found that the postcard sellers all over the town had postcards made from
the color reproductions in this book. You can buy them all over Palermo, so
somebody made money out of that.

SMITH: The next article I wanted to talk about was "Some Reflections On
Portraiture in Byzantine Art," and the question of style assuming the role of an
iconographical attribute, which you've already raised. It seems to be implicit already
in the Monreale book — or is it? Is style playing an iconographical role in Monreale?
KITZINGER: No, not specifically in Monreale, I would say. You get a different
style for the hieratic single figures of saints in apses as distinct from this very lively
action in the narrative scenes. Of course in the heyday of nineteenth-century belief in
the original and creative artist, it was very hard to believe that the same artist could
have done these stiff, rigid, "Byzantine" figures and also these lively ones. That I
think is nowadays no longer a problem for people; they can see that the same artist
can vary his style according to subject to that extent. I mentioned earlier that this late
Comnenian style itself must have some relation to iconography and there must have
been some reason why it developed, but not specifically in relation to Monreale, so I

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don't think that iconography of style played a particular role there.

SMITH: Could you talk a little bit about how your conception of iconography of

style is similar to but also may differ from other art historians who have tackled that

kind of subject?

KITZINGER: Some people have done far more systematic work on "modes." For

instance, I am thinking of [Jan] Bialostocki, the Polish art historian who was director

of the museum in Warsaw and very much influenced by Panofsky. He did a

systematic study of stylistic modes, very much in the sense of a choice that an artist

had between different ways of representation. He did this far more systematically and

based much more on textual evidence than I ever did. So this was not unusual in this

period.

So far as the paper on portraiture is concerned, I tried to show that there was
a particular mode for portraying contemporary people, as distinct from, say, saints.
But that paper, in my autobiography, has another significance in that for me it
provided an occasion for a corrective of my earlier work on the period between
Justinian and iconoclasm. In the earlier paper I tried to show that the development of
an extremely abstract style in the late sixth and seventh centuries was intimately
connected with the cult of images. As I said earlier, this is where it appealed to Ernst
Gombrich, because it was form following function. I have actually quoted his
Meditations on a Hobby Horse, where he says that the greater the wish to ride, the

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fewer forms you need to make a horse. For a child a hobby horse is just a stick with
something of a head, and that's enough to give him the idea that he is riding. I said
that by the same token, these seventh-century images are very simplified images of the
human figure — just outline and minimum of detail, and that's enough for someone
who wants to pray. In fact, a fully elaborated figure with all the modeling and three-
dimensionality could be an obstacle, because the image of the saint or the deity is in
yourself, and you don't need all this elaboration. I quoted a passage from the
publication of the Painter's Manual — a visitor to Mount Athos. He talked to the
monks there, comparing their art to western art, and the [monks] attacked the idea of
perspective and three-dimensionality as being a distraction and an impediment to real
devotional art. All this seemed to fit together, so I linked the stylistic development of
that period very much to the rise of the cult of images.

SMITH: But that Athos quote would have come from a later period, would it not?
KITZINGER: Yes, that was the man who first edited the so-called Painter's Manual.
It had medieval beginnings and continued to be used as a guide for the redecoration
of churches through the eighteenth century. There are lots of manuscripts of this, and
the first man who tried to investigate it was a man called [Adolphe-Napoleon]
Didron, in the early nineteenth century. He quotes a discussion with these monks in
his French edition of this manual. Having become very much aware of the fact that
the portraits of contemporary donors tended to be more abstract than the saints, I

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realized then that a simple equation of abstraction to holy image wasn't satisfactory.
In this paper, without openly polemicizing with myself too much, I did apply what I
considered a corrective. The coins of Justinian II that I illustrated there were issued
just a few decades before iconoclasm. Justinian II was the first to introduce the image
of Christ on his coins. That of course has to do with the role religious images had
acquired by that time. The image of Christ was on the obverse, where the emperor
used to be, and Justinian II's own image was on the reverse.

Justinian II had one issue of coins in which the Christ image is very classical,
actually, based on prototypes like Zeus, or some people think Asclepius — anyway,
ancient father gods, reproduced in a remarkably classical way. And on the other side,
Justinian's own portrait is much more abstract. I'd say that illustrates the use of the
portrait mode for the contemporary figure. But then he has another issue of coins in
which Christ's face is as abstract as his own. My thesis in this paper is that this was
precisely because it was meant to be an authentic image of Christ as distinct from an
idealized one. There was the idea that in certain icons the actual countenance of
Christ had been transmitted to later centuries. It wasn't actually my idea that this
abstract Christ type was meant to be authentic; that had been said by other people
before. But I applied it in this context to show that abstraction can be a means of
saying that this is a contemporary person. So that is iconography of style.
SMITH: Yes, your conclusions there seemed to be very clear, and almost inescapable

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in terms of the evidence that you present. But is there any kind of textual evidence
that style at any time in this period had iconographical connotations?
KITZINGER: No, because nobody wrote about style in that period. The
terminology didn't exist to formulate such a thing. This gets us off on a tangent, but
that's one of the remarkable things about late Anglo-Saxon, early Norman England;
you get writers who actually try to describe artistic forms. Meyer Schapiro has
written, very correctly, that at that time there was an attempt at least to find a verbal
means of defining style, but not in Byzantium in the seventh century.
SMITH: But this raises to me an epistemological question, which is, here you have
people who clearly seem to be using style in a conscious manner to indicate two
different kinds of being, and yet they don't have the terminology, they don't have the
language, to make this distinction. So how is it conveyed? How do they even know
that they're doing this if they haven't cognized it linguistically, if you know what I
mean?

KITZINGER: Yes, I understand what you mean. In sources of the period you do get
distinctions made between different subjects in the figurative arts. For instance, it
was decreed at a council in 692 that Christ was not to be represented as the lamb of
God. You had to represent him in human form, and that of course was very
characteristic and important. A. M. Friend made much use of that passage, and to me
too it was very important.

215

Then there was a question of whether angels could or should be represented at
all, because they were spiritual beings. I [addressed that problem] because it did I
think result in a particular way of representing angels. They are often more
Hellenistic than other figures in the same context. This Hellenistic impressionism has
a sort of insubstantial aspect to it. So, yes, you have texts going so far that they make
distinctions between different subjects, without formulating the actual form.

You do get what are in effect references to form in connection with the
description of works of art; the criterion here is "liveliness," particularly in Byzantine
literature: "The figures are so alive that they could actually walk out of the picture."
Which may not be true at all in reality. These are topoi — standard formulae of
aesthetic appreciation. But actual defining of styles I don't think you get.
SMITH: Could one infer then that there might be missing manuals or missing texts
that dealt with style, which just haven't survived?

KITZINGER: No, I don't think so. We do have these painters' guides that have
survived from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there are also some
medieval ones, and they tell you that John the Baptist has to wear a fur coat and his
hair has to be wild; that far they would go, but not how you actually represent him,
how you actually paint him. So we have these very extensive manuals, but they don't
talk about style.
SMITH: Could we then infer that there must have been an oral tradition that the

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artisans handed down from generation to generation, without it being committed to

writing?

KITZINGER: Yes, I think an apprentice in a painter's workshop would be told,

"When you do an angel you do it like this one" — you know, giving him a model,

without having to define the style.

SMITH: You don't think they would have defined the style? The terminology simply

didn't exist to define the style.

KITZINGER: I think they would have thought in terms of prototypes that you

followed. And we have evidence all over the place that they followed prototypes and

they would be the guide for the apprentice.

SMITH: So the cognitive process was visceral rather than intellectual.

KITZINGER: Yes, I would say that. I think that Schapiro article I mentioned is very

interesting in that sense because the texts he discusses are so exceptional. Actually,

Saint Cuthbert's coffin comes into this, because one of the writers of that period in

England actually writes about that coffin and defines it beautifully — the particular

character of those incisions. It's incredible. But that's really the exception that proves

the rule. There's endless writing in Greek on works of art, but not on style.

SMITH: In your conclusion, where you talk about the humanistic ethos of the

Hellenistic mode triumphing after iconoclasm, what did you mean by "humanistic?"

What does that term involve in that particular context?

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KITZINGER: Well, in that particular context, if you take the two natures of Christ,
which are a key theme in Byzantine theology, it's the human aspect, or the human
nature as distinct from the divine nature, that is brought out in these images, by using,
directly or indirectly — mostly indirectly — prototypes dating back from ancient Greek
art. If you want to debate whether "humanistic" is the right [term] —
SMITH: No, I'm just asking what you meant by the term because my own concept
has to do of course with the fifteenth century and so forth, and the West, so I wanted
to get a clear idea of what you were implying.

KITZINGER: What I meant there was using the human form, the human body also,
as a means of expressing what are ultimately human values, namely, in the case of
Christ, the understanding of human problems as expressed in the Gospels.
SMITH: But isn't the realist, or the human, connected with the cartoon-like images,
whereas the Hellenistic style is connected with the idealized in the divine? That's how
I read that article. So what we would think of as a realist presentation is identified
with an idealized conception of the human form as an expression of divine processes.
KITZINGER: As I say, it hinges very much on the idea of God having become man.
This is of course the essential point about Christianity, and certainly about Byzantine
Christianity.

Perhaps I should say that I'm very glad you've focused so much on that rather
short article, because it was a corrective to the thing that I myself had tried to

218

demonstrate previously in these papers in the fifties, and it was then the basis of what
I tried to do in my book Byzantine Art in the Making, where I tried to balance out the
abstract versus the traditional Greek, Hellenistic [style] in a much more nuanced way
than I had done in the earlier [work]. Of course as always, the nuanced thing is far
harder for people to accept than the simple, straightforward one, so that my earlier
formulation of "abstract equals devotional image" I think has had more of an effect
than what I then tried to do by showing it's a more complicated situation.
SMITH: Then the next article is "On the Interpretation of Stylistic Changes in Late
Antique Art," where you introduce the "other-directed," "inner-directed" categories,
though in a way that doesn't seem to me very much in the manner that [David]
Riesman was using them.

KITZINGER: No, not at all. I was simply using what seemed to be handy terms, and
of course it's totally different. I talked to him about this. I didn't meet him until well
along in my days at Harvard, and I then told him that I had misused his terms. He
was very intrigued by this, and I think I gave him a copy of that article. In a way he
was flattered, even though his terms were misused.

I should say, autobiographically, that this article was written in Princeton in
1966-67. I had resigned as director of studies at Dumbarton Oaks, after eleven years
of doing mainly academic administration. I felt I just couldn't do it any longer. Even
now I feel that in a sense I wasted what are in general the best years of a scholar's life

219

by giving them to institutional problems rather than my own, although I did do some

work during that time. But I resigned and I applied for a membership at the Institute

for Advanced Study quite deliberately in order to get away first of all, and to find my

feet again as a scholar; and that was the idea.

SMITH: But it's hard to see from your publication record that you needed to find

your feet.

KITZINGER: Well, the Monreale book and the Munich paper were based on things I

had done before.

SMITH: I see, yes.

KITZINGER: Monreale, I suppose, was the one [project] during that period where I

tried also to conquer what was for me some new territory. But on the whole, and

particularly in the early sixties, I don't think I produced very much — book reviews and

so on, just to keep a finger in things. So I felt I needed the [change]. I didn't really

think I was going to do a lot of writing during that period in Princeton; it was more a

matter of thinking.

Two things happened: one was an invitation from the Cleveland Museum to
give a lecture on that extraordinary group of early Christian marble sculptures that
they had just acquired. I got this invitation before I went to Princeton, during the
summer of '66. I do want to talk about this more, but probably not today. The other
thing was an invitation to a session at the College Art Association annual

220

meeting — that must have been in early '67 — which had as an overall subject the
interpretation of style. At that time people were deeply involved with iconography
and iconology — this was the heyday of iconology — and patronage studies. There was
a young art historian who organized this session deliberately to ask questions about
style.

I remember one paper on Ingres — a beautiful case of "iconography of style."
One always thinks of Ingres' classical figures, but he did Gothic figures too, and he
made choices among different modes. So my paper was one in that session, and it
gave me a chance to think anew about problems that I had been involved with earlier,
particularly the breakup of ancient art in the second, third, and fourth centuries. I
tried to distinguish the various factors that went into the major stylistic transformation
that took place. I tried to pinpoint the nonartistic factors as precisely as I could, and
they are of course the other-directed ones — the government, and in the case of the
late antique it's primarily the monarchy — in order to bring out all the more clearly
what I called the "inner-directed" factors.

As I said the other day, it only really dawned on me later that I was just giving
another name to Kunstwollen, because what I was really trying to define was what
went on in the artist himself. I was really hoping, by including those other-directed
factors, to focus on the inner-directed ones, which I felt were being totally neglected,
and that's still true to some extent today.

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SMITH: Of course you do observe that sometimes the style is other-directed; it's part
of the program, which must be a difficulty, knowing when it's programmatic and when
it's not.

KITZINGER: Exactly, yes; this was the whole point, to show that there are cases
where style also can be dictated from the outside. At that time I also collected other
examples from other periods. I remember there was a case where Guercino was
asked to do something in a certain style. Of course always in those cases the style
that is dictated must be a pre-existent one, because the patron has no other way. He
can only point to some painting or sculpture and say, "This is what I want." So by
definition, an other-directed style is a pre-existent style. On the other hand, if it's
inner-directed, it could be a groping towards a new form without actually fully
realizing it. It can be a very gradual process. I tried to show that this is a process
that took place gradually from the second century on, in late-Roman art.
SMITH: You mentioned earlier, I think it was off-tape, that [George] Kubler's The
Shape of Time had been a valuable book for you and you cited it.
KITZINGER: Yes, very much so, precisely because of this idea of gradualness,
without the artist necessarily being fully conscious of the end result. Although the
artist is in a state of rebellion against what has gone before, he doesn't necessarily
know at first exactly what he himself wants. I thought this gradualness was very well
demonstrated in this book.

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SMITH: The Shape of Time is also written from the problematic of a scholar who's

working with materials for which we have no way of knowing anything about the

artists. Even more so, I suppose, than in your case.

KITZINGER: Yes, but what happened in Rome between the second and fourth

century is not documented either. This really absolutely basic transformation that

takes place in art is not documented, and so in that sense it's like Kubler's prehistory.

SMITH: There are two other books that I link closely with Kubler's book as marking

a fundamental shift in the way people are looking at evidence, and one is [Kenneth]

Boulding's book, The Image, which was published in '58. I was wondering if you

were aware of that book.

KITZINGER: No, I've never read that.

SMITH: Okay. The other book is Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific

Revolutions, which became inescapable I'm afraid in any discipline.

KITZINGER: Which again I must confess I've never read. This is a book one knows

about, obviously, particularly in Princeton.

SMITH: Okay, well, that's probably to your benefit, actually, though it's a good

book. Nonetheless, the way it got picked up —

KITZINGER: But I realize that it is relevant also to the sorts of things that I have

been doing.

SMITH: How would one document the relative roles of patron and artisan in stylistic

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change? Actually, you started to get to that when you said that the patron can only
point to something that existed, but can't the patron point to these things and say, "I
want this and this and that combined together"?

KITZINGER: I don't think in practice, in those periods that I am concerned with, it's
very likely, but it's possible, certainly, that he points to several things, and asks for a
bit of this and a bit of that. One of the main areas where I try to come to grips with
"inner-direction" is in ornament. I think in ornament it's less likely than in figurative
art that the patron says, "This is what I want."

I wrote a paper for the annual medieval gathering in Spoleto a few years ago
on patronage. The whole conference was concerned with the medieval West, and my
paper was the only Byzantine one; it was supposed to give a kind of foil, contrast
almost, or background to patronage in the West by concentrating on the East. There
I did actually introduce as an example, ornament in an early sixth-century church in
Constantinople, commissioned by an extraordinary lady, Juliana Anicia, who was a
high aristocrat with enormous wealth. There's an extraordinary variety of ornamental
forms used in the decoration of that church, which was only excavated — by
Dumbarton Oaks actually — in the sixties. One of the remarkable things there is that a
lot of really nontraditional ornament appears — clearly ornament of Persian origin.
That was recognized right away, and people have written on it. Juliana had a husband
who had been a consul, and consuls, when they assumed office annually, had ivory

224

diptychs carved, so-called consular diptychs, which they sent out to their most
favored friends as New Year's presents. Well, Juliana's husband had been a consul
some years before. Before that he had been a governor in the eastern provinces of the
Byzantine empire, and some of his consular diptychs bear ornament of a distinctly
Persian type.

In this Spoleto paper, almost as a provocative idea, I put forward the
possibility that the couple had become acquainted with Iranian forms of decoration,
and then Juliana deliberately introduced them as a total innovation when she built her
church. So that would be a case of other-direction of ornament. I only quote that in
order to say that I don't think this was a normal thing at all. The kind of change in
ornament that I tried to focus on in the paper on stylistic change was very much what
I call a graphological change; someone does the same acanthus foliage that the
previous person had done, but introduces some subtle modifications, perhaps only
half-consciously, which show the direction in which this was going to develop in the
decades to come. Then over a longer time stretch you could see how this change
takes place. This is again the Kubler model, and that I think is a process that you
have to reckon with; it takes place within the artist himself. But, and this is a big,
important thing to me, what causes the artist to react in that way, to perceive the
ornament and to make these changes, is what I call the "alchemy" operated by his
own experiences as a social human being.

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[Tape IX, Side One]

KITZINGER: [I have] a very deeply-rooted conviction that artistic form means
something, and I suppose in a way it is a thing that I inherited. Having spent my
formative years during the heyday of German expressionism, maybe that is where I
first imbibed this. Certainly that was a factor in Wilhelm Koehler's own scholarly
make-up. I remember H. W. Janson once referred to him — which I thought was quite
unfair — as an "expressionist mystic," because he believed that form conveyed a
message in itself. I suppose you had that before Koehler; you had that in Dvorak too.

I mentioned earlier that I was asked by Weitzmann to do a paper for the
festschrift that he organized in the mid-fifties for Friend, to whom all this was
absolutely alien and nonsensical. If you read the last paragraph of my paper, I tried to
say that it's the artist who, having had this experience of the cult image in his own life,
then expresses it through line and color, and I called that the "alchemy" of
transformation of social experience into visual form. That is a basic thing to me, and
it certainly underlies this paper that you asked me about on the interpretation of style.
I thought by concentrating on ornament, where there's no question of subject-matter
having determined the form, and not much of a likelihood of the patron having done
so, I felt this was one way of really focusing on the artist, and on what went on within
him.
SMITH: But doesn't that get you into the dangerous territory of Zeitgeist?

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KITZINGER: Yes, it does, and I used the term, [laughter]
SMITH: Yes, I know.

KITZINGER: I make no apologies for that. I know it's a taboo term, particularly to
someone like Gombrich. I think I probably used the term in a sense very different
from Hegel. I don't reify it, not at all. To me it's a heuristic construct in order to link
the social, political, and cultural currents to the artistic form. In that sense I think it's
perfectly legitimate to use it. I have a file in my study of Zeitgeist problems, and I find
that people use the concept, without necessarily using the term, in all kinds of
contexts. For instance, in writing about Weimar Germany people sometimes use the
term, and often imply it. Journalists certainly use it all the time. What they mean is
this layer of feeling and thought in which the material experiences of the time come
together in people's minds.

SMITH: The other term that you used there that has all sorts of potential problems is
the question of "evolution" of style. Of course Darwinian evolution is natural
selection, random, but because much of the exposition of evolution came from
Spencer rather than Darwin, there are almost always teleological categories lying
underneath it.

KITZINGER: Yes, this is the danger, and this is why I like Kubler so much, because
I think he did this evolutionary study without becoming teleological. "Linked
solutions" is what he calls them, and that I find very useful because what I also feel is

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that the artist has a certain direction in which he wants to go without having a defined

goal; he just wants to change something in what he has inherited. Then one such step

following on another results in evolution. As you say, not in a Darwinian sense. In a

sense, though, Darwin comes in because certain things are acceptable, others are not;

it's the survival of the fittest.

SMITH: Yes, yes, which gets us back to the dangerous problem of teleology. But

still, probably more important is the way in which style then becomes the source of

evidence on social and intellectual life that wasn't otherwise available.

KITZINGER: Yes, and thereby justifying the—

SMITH: The autonomy of art history?

KITZINGER: The autonomy of art history, yes.

SMITH: But at the same time, you admit that style is the most difficult thing to

discuss scientifically. Actually, it's the easiest thing to discuss empirically; it's the

most difficult thing then to connect it to the social meaning.

KITZINGER: Yes, and this is where, to come back to the study of Monreale for a

moment, what you've just said is so true. You can define the stylistic innovation there

so clearly because you have within your grasp the model that was used, and you can

define it, but to say why this change [occurred] is much more difficult.

SMITH: But again I want to pose to you the question I've posed to others, and

particularly to both Weitzmann and to Buchthal. What has the art history of this

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period contributed to our understanding of the political and social history? Or has it?

Are we still back to the autonomy of the art object and its mystery?

KITZINGER: I think the contribution is definable in terms of iconography, and also

in regard to the very existence of the work of art in economic terms — who has the

money — but in those terms it tends to be tautological, as we said before. You are

told something that you already know. In the sphere where it really is autonomous,

it's very hard to define.

SMITH: If we imagine not having any written documents for the period of the

Tetrarchs monument and the Constantine monument, could we then deduce from this

that this was a period of military rule and an increasing rigidity?

KITZINGER: Yes, you could, certainly; if we didn't have written documents we

could infer that. Since we do have written evidence, a problem arises.

SMITH: So then what do the monuments add that's new? Do they help specify the

nature of that military mentality?

KITZINGER: One thing I think I said in that article on the interpretation of style was

that you can extrapolate to some extent from cases where you do have the

documentation to others where you don't have it. And you can then at least propose

that an analogous process took place. But another thing is of course that the visual

manifestation can bring home a particular message or a particular concern to people

who otherwise wouldn't be exposed to it.

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SMITH: Let me take an example from my own work. In post World War II art-
historical literature, abstract expressionist painting is sort of sloppily written about as
an expression of anxiety. My own feeling is that that's reading into the work; you
certainly can read anxiety into abstract expressionist painting, but that involves
projection, and if you actually go look at the documentary evidence, in most cases
anxiety is not really what it's about; there are many other issues.
KITZINGER: Well, Jackson Pollock certainly had his problems.
SMITH: Well, yes. [laughter] But the danger then of style being a Rorschach — that
we project into the style something —
KITZINGER: Yes, it's a vicious circle.

SMITH: A vicious circle, so who is to say that a complex visual style such as we
might find in the Book of Kells is as much based on a concept of harmony and
balance as some other work that is simpler and more clearly Hellenistic in its
approach, if you don't have the documentary evidence that allows you to do that?
KITZINGER: Well, I quite agree with you, and the Book of Kells in those terms is
an enormous problem: what went on in these people's minds? But I'm glad you
mentioned abstract expressionism, because in the introduction to Byzantine Art in the
Making I said that one thing I find that justifies my attempts to interpret style and to
find meaning in style is precisely this period in art where subject matter was
eliminated altogether and pure form dominated. It had an enormous following, after

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all. And why would that be, unless form itself has a message? The message is
psychological; it expresses a psyche and appeals to a psyche. Unless form has some
such function, certainly my whole work would be pointless. The difficulty lies in
defining it, but that there is meaning to form I think is unquestionable. Unless you
accept that the earlier expressionism of Kandinsky and the abstract artists in Russia in
the early years of this century, to which abstract expressionism in America was a
sequel, had something to say, it's inexplicable that they should have had such an
impact.

SMITH: Yes, but at some point one should be able to discuss the ways in which the
contemporaries of that art responded to it, not necessarily from the point of view of
content, but —

KITZINGER: Of course people like [Clement] Greenberg did try to do precisely
that.

SMITH: If I could impose on you just a little bit longer. I did also want to go on to
"The Role of Miniature Painting in Mural Decoration," which is a later article. The
thing that was interesting to me was how we determine if a shift in design motifs is a
result of internal innovation or external causes in terms of the prototypes shifting, as it
seems to me that Weitzmann often argues. Buchthal has spent much time looking at
the Musterbuch to see how these prototypes get shifted. Also, on the question of
artisanal traditions, Buchthal has tried to identify specific ateliers, particularly I guess,

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during the Macedonian period. Do you view this as a fruitful approach? I'm mixing
apples and oranges possibly, but be that as it may.

KITZINGER: That article was a commission for a program in Princeton to mark
Weitzmann's retirement, so in a way the whole occasion was supposed to be a
homage to Weitzmann, and I had considerable difficulties there because our
approaches were so different. It was in a way a polemic, and I remember his saying
after I delivered it, "Oh, I expected far worse!" [laughter] Because I had made it
clear to him beforehand that I wasn't just going to toe the line. He always knew this,
and we were always on perfectly good personal terms, but I had a lot of objections to
what he was doing. Of course I admired his absolutely prodigious output; this was
fantastic, and the way his whole work was organized. About two years ago, very
soon after he died, I wrote an obituary for him for the American Philosophical
Society, expressing my admiration for him. But there were these disagreements.

In this particular article, I tried to show that the relation of the Cotton Genesis
to the San Marco mosaics to me was an exception and not the rule. I felt that
Weitzmann based his work far too strongly on what happened in miniatures. In
regard to Monreale, I spoke earlier about how Otto Demus in this sense adhered to
this tradition of deriving everything from the stemma of manuscripts. I thought it was
important to point out that normally mural artists did not just project miniatures, as
though they had a slide projector, onto the wall. While going into some detail on the

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San Marco case, I tried to show that normally the mural artist was far more
independent. To do Weitzmann justice, he always, in theory at least, admitted that
people could vary things and so on, but basically for him the whole history was
carried on in the scriptorium.

After having disposed of San Marco, where I found myself essentially
agreeing with Weitzmann, I tried to show what mural artists did on their own. That
of course was very much along the lines of what I had done in Sicily, particularly on
the relation of Monreale to the Cappella Palatina, showing to what extent a particular
designer's work depended on the conditions that he found himself in in a particular
situation. That is certainly true in Monreale. But he did have models: in order to get
from the cycles in the Cappella Palatina to those in Monreale I had to assume that
sketches were made of the former, and of course we do have some actual evidence
from the Middle Ages of monumental paintings being copied in miniature for use in
some other situation.

I then found myself operating with the idea of the motif book, not necessarily
codified, but assembled collections of individual motifs — figures in particular poses
and so on. This is where the Wolfenbiittel book becomes extremely important; that to
me is absolute evidence for motif books, which then later, in periods which began to
have academies, were actually codified — I don't think that existed in the Middle Ages.
I think Buchthal misunderstood me by saying that within my terminology the

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Wolfenbiittel book is an iconographic guide rather than a motif book. It's true that
the Wolfenbiittel drawings are based on still recognizable compositions; for instance,
it is clear that the artist had seen a Transfiguration, with Christ and Moses and Elijah
by his side and three apostles in contorted poses, who had fallen down, blinded by this
vision. So there are iconographic themes there, but surely they are reproduced in this
case in order to isolate the interesting motif for possible use in different contexts. So
there was a disagreement there with Buchthal. But what was it you really wanted to
ask me about?

SMITH: I suppose my question comes back to the issue of identifying ateliers and
schools as a problematic in terms of examining these transmissions, because I guess I
would assume that an atelier would have its motif book. I mean, that would be part
of what we would define as a place of work, and whether they're copied from other
murals or illuminated manuscripts is really secondary. They have their repertoire of
prototypes they turn to that have been codified for them at least. What do you think
is the viability of identifying ateliers and schools, and perhaps ateliers that move, in
the sense of identifying continuities of training, if not of exact imagery? If that
question makes sense.

KITZINGER: I think I would identify ateliers, and I think most of us would, much
more in terms of actual execution, of almost Morellian detail, rather than in the use of
particular [motifs], although of course the latter could be useful in certain cases. For

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instance, there's the classic case of a gospel book in Goslar which has motifs that
figure in the Wolfenbiittel book. There we have a case where a motif was
incorporated by an artist. But I don't think, on the whole, one gets terribly far in
defining schools and ateliers by means of the use of particular motifs. I think it's
much more the color and shape of line and so on that enables one to define a
particular atelier as distinct from another.
SMITH: So it remains stylistic, then.

KITZINGER: I would assume, but that may be my prejudice.
SMITH: Though might not the motifs also have a stylistic aspect?
KITZINGER: Yes, with motifs you are in a borderline area in any case.
SMITH: I've used the term "artisan" sort of purposefully, rather than "artist,"
because I'm curious about the degree to which the banausos reputation continued in
the Byzantine period. You did mention earlier today that the Byzantine artist had an
aristocratic image, and yet the traditional Greek term for the artist is also the term for
"idiot" or "moron."

KITZINGER: I try to avoid the term "artist" in my more recent writing, partly
because of its connotations of Vart pour I'art, partly because the status of an artist in
medieval society was not that of the modern artist, and partly because so much other-
directed quantity goes into the work of art. So I would agree with the term "artisan"
much more than the term "artist," and the tools that he had included these motif

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books. I try to avoid the term "model book" because it mixes up the motif book with
the overall iconographic guide.

SMITH: Is there evidence that the artisans had enough education and social respect
that they could negotiate with their patrons and impose their own view on things?
KITZINGER: I can't think of any evidence of that. It probably did exist, but like in
so many of these [cases], we just haven't got the actual documentation. But that the
artisan or artist was able to influence the patron, yes, I think that's possible.

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SESSION FIVE: 31 MAY, 1995

[Tape X, Side One]

SMITH: Before we get going, I thought I might just ask you if you had any further

thoughts since February on what we talked about at that time. If you don't, then we

can proceed, but you may have reflected somewhat.

KITZINGER: Yes, I did, more really to underline points which I think I made but I'm

not quite sure that they really came [across]. But that had better be judged when I

see the transcript. I think the essential thing is my conception of art and art history;

the thread that goes through the whole thing. I think if we go on to [talk about]

Byzantine Art in the Making, a lot of these things will come out anyway

SMITH: Okay. Why don't we then move into that book.

KITZINGER: I may be repeating myself, and you will tell me when I do, because a

lot of the issues that played a part in our last interview are central to this book.

SMITH: How did this book come together?

KITZINGER: Do you know the name of Michael Jaffe, the ex-director of the

Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge?

SMITH: Yes.

KITZINGER: He was a visiting professor at Harvard in 71, 72, and as a result of

that contact, he got Cambridge to invite me to give the Slade Lectures in 75. I was

glad to accept this, particularly with the idea of forcing myself to pull together a lot of

237

things which were scattered in various past publications. Of course by that time I had
started pulling things together in my lecturing at Harvard, where I had gone in '67.
But this offered the opportunity to make it a more formal and more concentrated
thing. You are supposed to do twelve performances as a Slade lecturer, but the term
has only eight weeks, and it wasn't supposed to be more than a lecture per week. So
the format compelled me to condense the essential part of what I wanted to say into
eight lectures, and the other four then were seminars which I did the following term,
which expanded on the lectures.

So that's how that book came about. I decided I would try to pull together
my ideas about the genesis of medieval art in the late antique and so-called early
Christian periods. I had great trouble finding a title. I can't remember now what title
I finally chose for the lectures, and then I had even greater problems finding a title for
the book that came out of it. I spent almost a whole year after the lectures converting
them. This was really a major job. I think one can still recognize in the book as it
was published that it was a series of lectures. The chapters more or less correspond
to individual lectures, but I changed it very drastically.

SMITH: In pulling this material together, which in many respects represents the
previous thirty years' work, were there key areas where your thinking was clarified
particularly, or changed in some way?
KITZINGER: A lot of clarifying had already been the result of my teaching in the

238

previous six or seven years, and that was partly why I had decided to go to Harvard,
to have a chance to do precisely that, because in Dumbarton Oaks I was just digging
deeper and deeper without giving out.

The coursework at Harvard was preparation for this [book], and the Slade
Lectures took it a lot further. New things did occur to me as I was [writing this
book.] As you quite rightly said, it pulled together things from the previous thirty
years. And of course the twenty years that have passed since doing this
book — [especially] the last ten years — have brought changes in art history that make
the book almost a prehistoric document. You've just [interviewed] Griselda Pollock.
From what I've seen of her work, nothing could be further away from what my book
represents. In a way, the subtitle says it all: Main Lines of Stylistic Development in
Mediterranean Art — 3rd-7th Century. "Style" is out, and "development" is out
too — development in the sense that there is a sort of autonomous process within art
history whereby one thing grows out of another. If you don't believe in that, this
book doesn't make any sense. But the more important thing is the total disinterest in
style that has occurred in these years. In this country certainly the book has had a
very limited effect. I don't know whether you have seen the original edition, which
was done by Faber and Faber?

SMITH: I looked at the edition that we had at the University of Michigan library.
KITZINGER: Which was probably a paperback.

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SMITH: No, it was hardback, so it might have been the original.
KITZINGER: My son Tony, who is a typographer, was on the staff of Faber's at that
point. He put in an enormous effort and it really became a very attractive book. He
made a tremendous effort to get the illustrations right and so on, so it was just
physically a very attractive book, and for its price at that time, really a bargain.
Nevertheless, I think its success in this country was very limited. In America it was
more [successful], but that is largely due to the fact that there wasn't, and there still
isn't really, another book on this period in English that can be used as a textbook. I
still get annual royalties, twenty years later.

I think the country where it has probably had the most success is Italy,
because in Italy, with the Croce tradition and so on, there is still sympathy for this
approach. Italians are so aesthetically involved with their own art, and Ravenna is
crucial in this book, so it has a kind of natural affinity for them. It was also translated
into German. And in Germany also there is some [interest], but, generally, its main
ideas haven't been taken up — that's the point.

SMITH: I was looking at some of the more recent books on late Roman imperial art,
and there seems to be a greater concern for religious ritual and the way in which art
functioned not so much as part of the theology, but the ritualistic aspects —
KITZINGER: Its role in society.
SMITH: Yes. One book was about how Romans would have embodied themselves

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and conceived themselves as subjects from looking at this art in somewhat the same
period, from the third to the seventh century.

KITZINGER: That has to do also with reception theory, which is very important.
SMITH: Was that kind of discussion, of ritual, reception theory and subjectivity and
so forth already beginning in the 1970s?

KITZINGER: Oh yes. But Byzantine Art in the Making was very much meant to be
a pulling together of things in my own work of the previous decades. I do think that I
tried to do a little more in that book than only describing this famous development. I
also made some effort to interpret its meaning: why there were these really
tremendous changes in style that happened, and what this meant in terms of society
and patrons and so on. So I did try to put it into a social context, but only to a very
limited extent, certainly. But I think, aside from this interest in social context, which
was already very strong at that point and has grown even stronger, a basic idea in my
work, and why I got into this period, was to try to define the role of the creative
individual under even the most adverse conditions, and they could hardly have been
more adverse than they were in those centuries. The artist as a figure disappears, and
it's all anonymous. I haven't read much of the deconstructionists and so on, but when
you read that the author doesn't matter anymore — you know about these things much
better than I, obviously — that it's the subtext that matters rather than what the author
intends, then of course my approach is absolutely hopelessly out of date. Do you see

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what I mean?

SMITH: Yes, I see what you mean.

KITZINGER: The whole trend in general is that the creative effort is ruled out,

really. In literature of course the same thing has happened.

SMITH: The author is an effect of the text.

KITZINGER: Yes, and if you take that as an intellectual background, then of course

this book is even more of an anachronism.

SMITH: But I assume that you have faith that your perspective still has validity?

KITZINGER: Yes, I continue to believe that visual form has a message, that it is a

means of communication, and that's my whole point. The artist is someone who is

able to translate concerns of a period into a visual form. In the introduction to that

book I [pointed out] that, paradoxically, the loss of interest in style during these

recent decades coincided with a period in art which elevated form to an

unprecedented degree. With abstract expressionists there was no content at all, it was

all form, and people lapped that up, but they would not recognize it as a force in art

of the past. This is putting it in very extreme terms, but oddly enough, I don't think

that point was picked up by anyone — this curious dichotomy in our own way of

handling visual art.

You still get now, often in a very effective way, a kind of style analysis by art
critics, as distinct from art historians. If you read any review in a good newspaper by

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an art critic about art exhibitions, you get a lot of this approach, but you don't apply
it as a historian anymore. It's a very odd [phenomenon]. I feel that this has a
tremendous effect on teaching. I think how the student of art history in my days was
trained visually, and learned first of all to register visual effects and then put them into
words, articulate them. I don't think students nowadays learn that. So I think a
whole realm of sensibility has got lost there.
SMITH: Permanently lost, do you think?

KITZINGER: I don't know. I hope not, because I think that the power of the "art"
part of visual art is so great that there will always be some people who will try to
articulate it and to interpret it.

SMITH: You view this book as a summa of — that's the word that you used — of your
work. How did your contemporaries respond to it?

KITZINGER: Well, that's another thing I want to say: it has had very few serious
reviews. There's a professor at Bryn Mawr, Dale Kinney, who actually made it a
subject of a term's seminar. She then wrote a long review article, very intelligent and
very carefully done, in which she tried, first of all, to convey the content of the book,
and then constructively criticize it. But that's the only effort of that kind that I'm
aware of. I remember one review by an American colleague who just said that style
doesn't mean anything. It's just a means of attributing a particular object to a
particular date, but beyond that it doesn't say anything. And that, I think, in the age

243

that has seen Jackson Pollock and so on, seems to me very strange.
SMITH: Do you have an explanation, for yourself, of why this is?
KITZINGER: I don't know whether we'll get back to the congress in Rennes, which
took place in the early eighties, where I was asked to do the concluding [comments].
There I tried to go a little into the explanation of this attitude.
SMITH: Before we get to that, what about your graduate students? Where were
they placing themselves in these studies? Were they interested in questions of style,
or were they picking up the new reception theory and deconstruction and
poststructuralism and applying it to these topics?

KITZINGER: First of all I should make very clear that I myself was very interested
in reception theory. This book has its focus on stylistic problems, but the reaction of
the people of the period certainly was always of great interest to me also, to say
nothing of a lot of other things that I had done and was interested in that had nothing
to do with style at all. It's probably true to say that a lot of the students were more
interested in those other areas at that time than in studies on style, but at Harvard
there was a very strong tradition of connoisseurship, and of course this was another
area where style came in, so students were exposed to this problem, not just by me,
but by a lot of other older faculty members. I remember, for instance, the students
initiated a series of evening meetings on style during those years, because they
realized that there was a problem there. I don't think those meetings were particularly

244

productive, but to answer your question, yes, there was a response.

SMITH: Was Rosalind Krauss still there?

KITZINGER: She was a graduate student, wasn't she?

SMITH: Her Ph.D. was from Harvard — the mid-seventies as I recall.

KITZINGER: It must have been earlier, because I only met her later, at meetings and

so on. I didn't know her at Harvard. But then, you know, students were rather

specialized, and anyone with her interests wouldn't necessarily go to my courses.

SMITH: Right.

KITZINGER: But I don't remember her in those style meetings either, so I think it

must have been earlier.

SMITH: Were students interested in questions of gender and sexuality at that time?

KITZINGER: I arrived in '67, and '68 was the great year of the student revolt, and if

you talk of the central interest of students, it was politics and the Vietnam war. This

of course became a thing that affected everyone. I remember being challenged by

students to make an announcement in class on current political issues, which I didn't

do. But that was the mood, and it's very hard to remember now, but no, feminism

and sexuality were not the key issues at that point. In the course of the seventies, I

suppose [those issues] did come to the fore, but they didn't really affect my relations

with students.

SMITH: I know you mentioned in passing your article on the Cleveland marbles, but

245

I don't think we discussed it in detail, and it actually precedes Byzantine Art in the
Making. You gave lectures on the marbles in 1966-67, but the book was not
published until 77.

KITZINGER: Do you know what the Cleveland marbles are?
SMITH: No

KITZINGER: They are a group of six miniature portrait busts and five statuettes,
which were bought by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1963. Having been smuggled,
presumably, out of Turkey, they were therefore, what shall I say . . . something you
shouldn't touch. Four of these little statues represent the story of Jonah being
swallowed and spat out by the fish. Photographs of them were submitted to
Dumbarton Oaks, very shortly after they had arrived in America, by the dealer who
had them in New York; it must have been '64. I remember taking one look at these
photographs and saying, "This is impossible. They are obvious fakes, because they
look like Bernini sculptures." You know, this fish was full of contortions, spitting out
this figure, also contorted. It was absolutely incredible, totally unlike anything I had
ever seen in early Christian art, although Jonah was a key subject. He was very
frequently represented because there were all these symbolic connotations of death
and resurrection.

The Cleveland Museum, under its very courageous and enterprising director,
Sherman Lee, acquired these statues as part of a major acquisition campaign

246

preceding the fiftieth anniversary of the museum's founding — they wanted to make a
big splash. Of course all this had to do with Cleveland being a very civic-minded and
very self-conscious kind of community. The museum, like the orchestra, plays an
enormous part in this. All this culture is combined in one area of Cleveland, in a park
created by [Frederick Law] Olmsted.

As part of these fiftieth anniversary celebrations, they wanted lectures on
various acquisitions, and they asked me to do the lecture on these marbles. So
suddenly, instead of just looking at photographs and tossing them away, I found
myself faced with the question of either saying yes or no. I said I couldn't accept this
invitation without seeing the marbles; I had only seen photographs. So they flew me
out there, and I was able to see them. I spent a day there, still being very undecided.
That was the year when I was in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study. I said
I would go back to Princeton and let them know.

I spent the following week or ten days looking into the whole period of early
Christian sculpture in which these pieces supposedly belonged and realized fairly
quickly that they had to be genuine, simply because everything fitted into known
categories, particularly the portraits, although the thing as a whole was totally new.
Individual aspects of these statuettes too were absolutely right. I concluded that no
forger could have read all this learned literature in order to arrive at this result. So
this was my one experience, and effort, in my whole career, of trying to cope with

247

authenticity problems and with connoisseurship. As I say, Harvard had a great
tradition of connoisseurship, but most of my [objects] were mosaics, or frescoes on
the walls, about which there was no question.

At the time, almost everyone in the field was against the Cleveland marbles,
and in Princeton there was a whole contingent of experts, not to mention people like
Panofsky, who were all against their being authentic. I gave lecture after lecture and
became a kind of missionary and gradually began to convert people. The curator of
medieval art under Sherman Lee at Cleveland was William [D] Wixom, who is now
the medieval man at the Metropolitan Museum. Sherman Lee was very anxious that
Wixom should be the first to publish the Cleveland marbles, so a whole issue of the
museum bulletin was devoted to them, written by Wixom. I allowed him to
incorporate my findings, which in retrospect probably was a mistake. He was very
fair, and he emphasized all over the place what I had contributed, but the point was
that the whole thing came out under his name alone.

I wasn't able to [publish on the marbles] under my own name until the Early
Christian congress in Rome in 1975. I gave a paper at the congress and it was then
published. In this Rome paper I tried not to concentrate on the authenticity problem
anymore, although in Rome, I still remember, there were lots of skeptics, and in
Europe it took a longer time to overcome this. But I tried to concentrate on other
aspects. Now I think the marbles are generally accepted as being genuine. There are

248

a number of general books on early Christian art in which they have been reproduced,
and there's only a very small minority now who [believe they are fakes].

I was also looking at some of the problems [in authenticity] that had arisen in
the past, for instance, the famous set of silver plates found in Cyprus at the beginning
of the century that the Metropolitan Museum had acquired from J. P. Morgan. They
also didn't fit the textbook concept of the art of that period at all, and were rejected
outright by a lot of people. Then, gradually, more and more evidence came out, and
now there is no question that they are genuine. So this acceptance of things that don't
fit the textbook [models] is a fairly common phenomenon in art history scholarship,
and I was conscious of that.

SMITH: How did you explain for yourself the eccentric nature of the style?
KITZINGER: Well, the first point was that they had been put in the wrong century.
Cleveland acquired them as late fourth century, which means a time of already fully
developed Christian art and sculpture, and the first thing that I became aware of,
largely, as I say, through working on those portraits, was that this was not fourth
century but third, meaning before the triumph of Christianity, when all we have is
catacomb painting in Rome, essentially, plus this one great discovery in the East,
which was the town of Dura-Europus. Have we talked about Dura at all?
SMITH: Only in passing, vis-a-vis Kurt Weitzmann's arguments.
KITZINGER: You see, in Dura, which was a Roman garrison town of the early third

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century, a synagogue was found with paintings — which was a total revelation and
destroyed forever the idea that Jews had no visual art — and a Christian community
house with a baptistery. This was literally the only monument of Christian art of the
period before Constantine in the entire eastern Mediterranean world, and it didn't fit
anything. Well, it fitted to some extent things that had been known from Rome, but a
lot of things were totally unexpected. These Cleveland marbles are also from the pre-
Constantinian era, but they are from a totally different part of the Eastern world,
namely Asia Minor. Dura was a Roman garrison town with sort of "sub-antique"
features, but the marbles belong to and reflect a society in prosperous Asia Minor,
where members of the imperial family had their estates, and they reflect a totally
different taste and different style. When you look at what was produced for these
aristocrats, insofar as they were pagan, then this isn't so strange anymore. It simply
translates an artistic language that they were already used to, into a Christian one. So
from that point of view it's also very interesting.

SMITH: This is somewhat tangential, but it relates to the interviews we've been
doing with archaeologists, in which a major issue is whether scholarship should be
applied to objects whose provenance is suspicious, and whether by doing so one
encourages tomb robbing and monument desecration and possibly forgeries. How
have you dealt with that issue?
KITZINGER: I have been very closely affected by this, but not so much in relation to

250

the Cleveland marbles, which were acquired by Cleveland and I was simply asked to
interpret them as an art historian. Once they were there, they had to be dealt with, so
to speak, scientifically. I was much more affected by that problem in relation to this
great silver hoard that was acquired by Dumbarton Oaks while I was director of
studies. It was almost exactly the same period in which the Cleveland marbles
appeared — the heyday of smuggling out of Turkey. Dumbarton Oaks acquired this
really spectacular treasure, and while I wasn't responsible for its acquisition, because
that was a matter for the director and the trustees and so on, I was very much affected
by this, and Dumbarton Oaks as a whole was very much affected because it soured
relations with Turkey very badly.

That's an issue which would require separate treatment, but in answer to your
question, yes, insofar as wanting to interpret objects, classify them, date them, I had
no hesitations; I think that has to be done. In fact, that's the only justification really
for having them. As far as this silver is concerned, I wrote one article on a pair of
silver book covers, which were part of this treasure, and for a long time these book
covers remained practically the only part of that treasure that anyone dealt with in a
scholarly way at all.

SMITH: The next item on your bibliography that we were going to talk about is your
closing remarks for the Artists, Artisans, and Artistic Production of the Middle Age
conference that I presume Xavier Barral [i Altet] organized in Paris?

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KITZINGER: In Rennes.
[Tape X, Side Two]

KITZINGER: The papers ranged from the late antique to the end of the Middle
Ages, [and the participants were asked] to discuss their material from every aspect
except style and iconography. In other words, the two traditional main approaches
were ruled out and it [focused] entirely on economics, patronage, techniques, and
organization of work. As Barral said in his introduction I think, "Concentrate on les
hommes and not les oeuvres" — the people behind the thing rather than the object
itself. This was an enormous success. Originally it was meant to be three or four
days, but so many people wanted to participate that it became a whole week, and to
speed things up people were not allowed to present their papers. The papers were all
distributed ahead of time, and we only discussed them. There was an enormous
dynamic behind it. A lot of people were opposed. Barral wasn't all that popular with
a lot of his colleagues. In France a number of scholars refused to be involved at all,
but internationally it had an enormous response.

I gave a paper on my Sicilian mosaics, an aspect of which fitted into the
question of guilds and workshops. But then Barral asked me to do the closing
remarks for the whole conference which, given its size, was quite [a task]. It would
have been quite impossible to summarize conclusions; it was far too diverse and
disparate. I still see myself sitting down in this rather nice mansion where I was put

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up in Rennes the night before, trying to pull together what I wanted to say. I decided
to simply speak about what all these approaches that were used in this congress meant
in relation to what the history of art is all about. I tried to remind people that what
we had been spending this week on, very fruitfully and productively, was what I
called the infrastructure of art, and not art itself.

This was really the first of a number of efforts I have made since the early
eighties to become a little polemical in relation to what was going on in the history of
art, and still is going on. In other words, it's a kind of a counter-offensive on the part
of traditionalists who believe that artistic form has a meaning in itself. I think there is
one sentence in there where I say that one must not confuse conditions of production
with mainsprings of creation. In other words, there is such a thing as a visual
creation, which none of these approaches that were used really could explain. Of
course when you talk to someone like Griselda Pollock, for whom everything is a
struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed and goodness knows what, there is
a total gulf. Art as a handmaiden of social history is what I tried to argue against.
SMITH: There's an irony in this because much of your work is involved in trying to
wed social history and art history.

KITZINGER: I don't deny the importance of it, not at all. We've talked previously
about this whole business of the cult of images and the social conditions and so on.
Obviously, I have always tried to explain, but with the focus on what comes out of it

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in the artist's work; whereas, what's being done now makes art history a handmaiden
of social history — it's the other way around. So for me, social history is an important
element in doing the history of art, but not art history merely as social history. That's
the thing, and that's what I tried to say.

SMITH: Some people talk about a crisis in art history, and I suppose that's what we
could be referring to: the art object no longer is central. Obviously you still believe
that the art object should be central, but how do you explain for yourself the fact that
much of art history has moved into either sociologizing or psychologizing?
KITZINGER: I think I tried to touch upon this a little also in that Rennes speech,
that art historians feel challenged partly by scientists. They feel that they are accused
of just dealing with beautiful objects and enjoying them, and there's a feeling that in
the political conditions of the late twentieth century, they are dealing with a luxury,
which is unjustified and isn't right. If you think of a figure like Bernard Berenson,
with his villa I Tatti, this is something that, socially and sociologically, the late
twentieth century is opposed to. The kind of art history that people like myself
represent is associated with that kind of a social life, which is certainly not mine, nor
that of many.

SMITH: But it is also a post-Ruskinian cult of beauty. Well, Ruskin of course does
have a social content, but it is an aestheticist cult of beauty that's involved with some
aspects of art history, particularly what has traditionally been identified with Harvard,

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where connoisseurship and taste were more important than unpacking in a scientific

way how art became a form of meaning, if that makes sense.

KITZINGER: Well, certainly. What I think is a major factor psychologically is

sympathy for the common man. If you talk about medieval cathedrals now, or for

that matter about Egyptian pyramids, the question is: "Who actually did the work and

how were they paid? What did these poor people suffer?" and so on. There is this

whole concern with the common man, which is of course a very positive factor in late

twentieth-century thinking, but I think it's misapplied when you say that therefore we

mustn't deal with the beautiful.

SMITH: Are there younger art historians who you think are doing the kind of

combination of stylistic and social interpretation that you adopted?

KITZINGER: I can't really judge. I remember talking to people in Germany about

this a few years ago, and they assured me that this was something that was coming

back. But I can't say I have any real evidence.

SMITH: Should we move on to the three volumes oflMosaici, the book on Norman

mosaics in Sicily?

KITZINGER: Perhaps we could leave that still for a moment. As long as we're

talking about my attempts to launch some mild kind of counteroffensive, [I'll relate]

my last effort. Every year in Spoleto, Italy, they have a medieval conference. They

had one on artistic patronage in the early Middle Ages, and I was asked to do a paper

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there on artistic patronage in Byzantium. The congress as a whole was really about
the early Middle Ages in the West, but as a sort of foil or background to this, they
wanted one lecture on Byzantium.

I've absolutely nothing against studies of patronage; it's obviously an
important thing. In my use of the term "other-directed" as against "inner-directed"
art, "other-directed" means patrons' influence on form, so I am the last person to
reject this approach or to deny its importance, but I thought that again this was an
opportunity to remind people in an international setting of the limitations of this, and
in talking about patrons in Byzantium, I had to speak about the commissioning of
icons, which became very important just in those centuries. I quoted an English art
historian who had discussed one of these icons that I had been talking about as "a
construction of society," and I ended up the whole lecture with quoting that and
saying that I didn't think this did justice to what the artist had done. It's not society,
it's the artist who ultimately creates the icon.

Even at the congress itself some people told me that they didn't think that was
fair, and then the author himself, whom I quoted, wrote me a stinging letter. So I'm
simply saying that on several occasions in these last ten or twelve years, I have tried
to reassert the importance of art, and the creator of art, against its detractors. So I
think that finishes the subject. I thought I'd better mention this now, as long as we are
talking about these things.

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SMITH: Do the three volumes on the mosaics of the Norman period in Sicily
complete the series, or will there be more?

KITZINGER: I've just been to Sicily to take the material for the fourth. They are
called fascicles. They are quite substantial volumes, but they consist of loose plates
with a separate, paper-bound introduction and catalog, and the whole thing is in a
hardcover portfolio. They are very lavishly produced actually, by the Sicilian
Academy of Arts and Sciences in Palermo, which gets its money from the Sicilian
regional government.

SMITH: Do these volumes break new territory?

KITZINGER: You see, the whole thing was a Dumbarton Oaks project, conceived
by the then director of studies, A. M. Friend, in the late forties, to publish
systematically the mosaic decorations in Italy that are clearly dependent on and reflect
Byzantine mosaic art. The two foci for this were Venice and Sicily. The Venetian
mosaics were entrusted to Otto Demus, and I undertook the Sicilian ones. I've
probably covered that account because it was part of the very difficult relationship
between Friend and myself. He had the idea of young people doing the kind of
research that fitted into his concepts, and I was out of sympathy with most of those
concepts. Settling for a project that meant primarily publishing the material, rather
than building up theories, in a way helped him, and let me out of becoming a real
slave to this rather dominating figure.

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The whole idea was documentation, because a lot of these mosaics had never
been published properly, and with that in mind, I got myself a Fulbright grant in 1950
and spent a whole year in Sicily. That was a year very largely devoted to
photography, which was a tremendous organizing effort. The first problem was to
find a competent photographer, which everybody told me you couldn't find in Sicily.
I was very lucky there to find a man who then became very well known, and still is
very well known, whose name is Fosco Maraini. He was really an ethnographer by
profession. He had been working with Giuseppe Tucci, who was a famous Italian
ethnographer, particularly interested in Tibet. Maraini was far more than an excellent
photographer; he was a very intelligent observer and an ethnographer in his own right.
He then published a book on Tibet which was in the press while I was starting in
Sicily. He was in need of money, and he took this on as a photographic job. In
addition to being a very good photographer and a very good ethnographer, he was
also a mountaineer and therefore didn't mind these terrific scaffolds that had to be
built.

One of my main problems was getting the scaffolds built, and then organizing
all this to get them into the churches at the right time when the clergy wouldn't object
too much. For instance, in one of the churches everything had to be done during two
weeks in Lent, before Easter, and it was just a terrible job to synchronize and
organize. Much of my time that year was spent on these matters, and on getting into

258

the archives of the monuments offices to find out what had been done in the past by
way of restoration; that was the other great problem. So much restoration had been
done on these mosaics over the centuries, I remember when I started on this people
said, "Why do you bother? It's all nineteenth-century work, it's not twelfth century."
This had a rather unfortunate influence on me because I became far too skeptical as to
the authenticity of the material, and our ability to distinguish the old from the new.
That however applied only to the period since the later part of the nineteenth century,
when restorers became very clever at doing mosaic. They themselves say in their
documents that the restorations should be indistinguishable from the original. But
that's where my work in the archives, which was largely concerned with documents of
the nineteenth century, was helpful, because I could tell what was done, at least in
terms of what mosaics were involved and for how long. In most cases the documents
wouldn't tell you exactly what was done, but there was a lot of information to be got
from these archives.

So my year was spent on that in 1950-5 1, and it was in that sense a very
fruitful year. Maraini wasn't able to finish all the work, there was just too much, and
when I then had a chance to go back there three years later, in '54, he was well known
because his Tibet book had been a great success, and he has been very successful ever
since. By the time I returned, the project had been recognized as being important in
Italy. I got a photographer from the Ministry of Public Instruction in Rome to come

259

to Palermo and work with me, so we were able to complete the photographic
coverage in '54. But then in '55 I became director ofstudi.es at Dumbarton Oaks, and
in the ensuing years I just wasn't able to do much on Sicily, and the [project] got onto
the back burner.

I did this one book on Monreale, in 1960, because the then archbishop of
Monreale wanted to do a monumental publication on the church. I did that with a
relatively limited text and with only a small number of my photographs, because by
that time color had become important. I wasn't able to do color in 1950. This was
the period of the Marshall Plan, and in Sicily to get any film was an effort, and
certainly not color film, so all my photography had to be done in black and white.
But by the late fifties color photography had come in, and this rather sumptuous
volume was published, with my relatively short text, on Monreale.

So all my [Sicily] material was languishing in my file drawers, both the
photographs and the archival notes. I wrote the occasional article, but the main task,
as it had been formulated in the late forties, was still undone. It was not until after I
retired and moved here to Oxford that I got back to this Sicilian material. My main
effort then was concentrated on the decoration of one church in Palermo, commonly
known as the Martorana, which is the smallest of the mosaic churches. There was
particular interest in this church on the part of Bruno Lavagnini, the head of the
Institute of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies in Palermo, because it was and still

260

is an Orthodox church. An agreement was made between Dumbarton Oaks and this
institute in Palermo to publish that church under joint auspices, so this is the one
church that I really went into in great detail, and this became a book which was
published in 1990 [The Mosaics of St. Mary's of the Admiral in Palermo]. It didn't
contribute anything to my intellectual development particularly, but it is probably one
of the most thorough studies of any such monument that has been done — the kind of
thing that now gets looked upon by some younger art historians as useless and
unnecessary.

SMITH: Even in your field?

KITZINGER: Yes. That book hasn't had much response either. There have been
some reviews in Italy, but I can't think of a major review in the English-speaking
world. Again, it's an anachronism, that kind of work. This book is what the French
would call tres fouille — very minutely researched. So this is the one monument for
which I did what I had originally set out to do for all of them. Of course by this time
I was pushing eighty, and it seemed quite impossible to start the same sort of thing on
any of the others.

One of the reasons why I had difficulties all along was this problem of
restorations, of not feeling sure of what was old and what was not old. Now there is
a younger generation of people interested in this kind of material who go into it with a
much more scientific attitude. They're not just looking and saying, "Well, that doesn't

261

look right," which is more or less what Otto Demus did in Venice and what I did in
Sicily. They are trying to establish technical criteria for distinguishing old from new.
That approach has its limitations, but it certainly can do more. It means of course
spending an enormous amount of time and effort. You have to have scaffoldings to
get very close to everything. In doing the photography we had scaffoldings, too, but
we kept on moving them, whereas for this you would have to keep them in place for a
long time. So this is really a task for future generations, but meanwhile it's probably
not even justified to do the kind of work that I did for the Martorana for the other
churches.

After that book was finished, there was a rather nice ceremony in Palermo for
the Italian edition of the book. I took that opportunity to discuss with various people
in Italy the possibility of doing a totally different kind of publication for this material
that I had been holding since the fifties. The idea was to publish the photographs,
which were very good, with just a brief introductory text, then leaving it to the
coming generations to really work with this material.

A number of different efforts were made in Italy to get this going, and it was
finally adopted, thanks to Bruno Lavagnini's intervention, by the Academy of Arts and
Sciences in Palermo, which is an eighteenth-century institution, originally called
Accademia del Buon Gusto, a good eighteenth-century name. At the beginning of
every year they get the money from the regional government to do this publication,

262

but with the condition that the publication has to be out by the end of the same year,
which puts me under terrific pressure. The project was really only launched in the
spring of 1992, and the first volume had to be out by December 3 1 of that year. It's
simply a question of a bureaucratic rule, which the Academy itself is subject to.
SMITH: But you didn't have a long text to prepare in that case.
KITZINGER: No, but even a short text is a task, and it was an extraordinary effort,
both on my part and, above all, the printer's part, in Palermo. There was only a very
limited exchange of proofs, and I was in the greatest fear when the first fascicle came
out that it would be totally inadequate, but it wasn't. They did a remarkably good job
with the photographs in this very limited time. There were mistakes made, which
needed correction, and when I tried to propose an errata and corrigenda list to go
with the second fascicle for people to put in the first, the Academy in Palermo said,
"No, we don't like to draw attention to mistakes." So I had my son do an errata list,
and I just included it with the copies that I had control over.

I was able to get the second fascicle published in 1993, and the third in '94; the
third fascicle being the first of three to cover all of Monreale. Just this last month I
took to Palermo the material for the fourth fascicle, which will be the second of those
devoted to Monreale, and there will have to be a third next year. The second one is
to come out at the end of this year, '95, and the third one is to come out in '96. That
will still leave for a future fascicle the smaller decorations, and at this point I am not

263

sure that the Academy will be willing to do this.^- Anyway, the first two fascicles
cover what has been to me always the key monument, the Cappella Palatina, the
palace chapel of the Norman kings at Palermo, and the following three will cover all
of Monreale. So if we get those two major monuments out of the way, that will be
something. But, again, it's an anachronism. This is a 1950s concept realized in the
1990s: all black and white, no color illustrations. Of course there just isn't money
now for that.

For the 1990 publication of the Martorana, some supplemental photography
was done purposefully to add a selection of color plates, but for the other books there
wasn't any money for that. In any case, it wouldn't have been justified, because there
are now plenty of what one might call coffee-table books with lavish color
illustrations. If people want to see color there are plenty of books now, and the merit
of my publication is that it is a complete coverage, which no one is likely to do for the
time being in Sicily.
SMITH: So it's a study publication?

* Publication of the mosaics by the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Palermo came
to a premature end with Fasc. IV (the second of three fascicles projected for the
mosaics of Monreale), the Sicilian Regional Government having ceased to provide the
Academy with the necessary funds. Completion of the coverage of the Monreale
mosaics has been assured, however, thanks to the Instituto Siciliano di Studi Bizantini
e Neoellenici (which now bears the name of Bruno Lavagnini, its founder) having
undertaken the publication of Fasc. V. [Note added by Kitzinger during his review of
the transcript]

264

KITZINGER: Yes, and when I talked to the secretary of the Palermo Academy after
the first fascicle came out, I asked him what reaction he was getting. He said, "Oh,
it's quite favorable, but people say, 'Why no color?'" I asked him how he answers
them and he said, "Questo e uno strumento scientifico" — This is a scientific
instrument. And this is the right answer to give. But of course, it is theoretically
possible now to do everything in color, and certainly when you see any daily
newspaper, or anything now, black and white in itself is no longer [enough].
However bad the color is, however untrue to reality, people are now conditioned to
have color.

SMITH: But color is from the point of view of art history, problematic, because
every color reproduction is a construction.

KITZINGER: Yes, well, but some of it is very good now. Certainly it tends to
distort somewhat, but when you look at these fascicles now they look out of date
already, although they've only just come out. In addition, this concept of corpus-like
complete coverage of any kind of material is, in a way, to a lot of younger people also
an anachronism. You publish your ideas, but you don't become a slave of the
monument. So in all these aspects this Sicilian publication is problematic.
[Tape XI, Side One]

KITZINGER: One of the difficulties there is distribution. This eighteenth-century
academy has absolutely no idea of how to market such a publication worldwide.

265

They have a mailing list of more than two hundred institutions in Italy to which they
automatically send everything and from which they in turn get everything. It's very
much a question of exchange. And they sent me lists of all these people at all these
institutions, and most of them will never look at this book. They are local historical
societies which have no interest in this whatsoever. So it's going to all the wrong
people. I have been struggling and still am struggling with that problem.

They've been generous in letting me have complimentary copies, which I can
try to dispose of. I have seen to it that a lot of those are sent to Dumbarton Oaks for
Dumbarton Oaks then to distribute to appropriate people in the States. In this
country, I carried it myself to the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum, and
the Warburg Institute and so on, and to a few individuals. But distribution is a real
problem with this, and as a result also publicity. It hasn't even been listed, let alone
reviewed, in any journal outside Italy that I'm aware of, except for one French
periodical where I knew the editor and sent her a copy of the first two fascicles for
reviewing, and that was reviewed in a more or less adequate way. So it's to some
extent stillborn.

SMITH: But it's a service you're providing for people.

KITZINGER: How many people nowadays are interested in that kind of coverage?
That's part of the problem.
SMITH: Well, academic projects are constantly redefining themselves, so in ten,

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twenty years it may be different.

KITZINGER: Some of my colleagues have said that the age of the corpus is over,
making it sound like something that was an invention of the twentieth century, and
whose day has passed. That of course is nonsense because there have been corpora
of various kinds of monuments, certainly since the seventeenth century, and also
comprehensive publications, particularly of mosaics, which we still use from the
seventeenth century. Yes, it's possible that there will be a new awakening of the kind
of interest for which a publication like this is essential, but at the moment I don't
think it exists.

SMITH: But I would think, even for someone who's interested in representations of
power and so forth, to be able to go through good quality photographs of an entire
body of work may reveal information that they would not otherwise find.
KITZINGER: Yes, I'm glad that you mention this, because even in the selection of
details for photography it is an anachronism, in a way. I did this at the time very
much with an eye on style and stylistic change. For instance, there's a lot of repetition
in the scenes of the seven days of creation in the Cappella Palatina and at Monreale.
In each scene the same figure of the Almighty appears, and I was always making a
point of photographing every one in detail, so one could compare the work of
presumably different "hands" in the same sequence. There's a sort of connoisseurship
approach there, and these photographic sets include a lot of details that help for that

267

kind of analysis and documentation, and nobody's doing that now. Actually, I'm not
putting into these Palermo fascicles every last print that I have, and I have eliminated
quite a number that I felt were really not justified anymore. But by and large I can't
deny that what informed this was an interest in how these things were made, and the
close-up photography helps a lot with that.

Of course how these things were made still holds contemporary interest in the
sense I was talking about in connection with the Rennes congress — workshop
organization, guilds, how many artists were involved, and all these things. To some
extent you can deduce these things from a detailed recording of the monument, and
so far as that period is concerned, you can only deduce them from the monument,
because there's no written documentation. We haven't got a single document that
tells us how many people were employed, what they were paid, and so on — the very
thing that the Rennes conference was concerned with. In the case of my material, that
can only be roughly inferred from the monument itself, and that's where detailed
photography certainly has its place, because otherwise you couldn't do it at all.
SMITH: You must not think it's so anachronistic, I mean, you're willing to put the
time into it.

KITZINGER: Those scaffoldings were gigantic — particularly in Monreale, which is
huge. I can show you photographs we took of the scaffolds. Tremendous effort
went into this, and I just felt terribly uncomfortable having all this material sitting in

268

my files. But I cannot make out of it something that it wasn't originally conceived to
be. And therefore it is essentially a fifties publication.

SMITH: Another item in your bibliography was "Interlace and Icons: Form and
Function in Early Insular Art," which was written as part of a conference.
KITZINGER: It was a conference which took place in Edinburgh in '91 . I had
reached the age when one is asked to do introductory lectures for congresses. It
was a specialist's conference, but they also wanted to make it a public event, so it was
given in an auditorium and there were a lot of lay people attending. I was the opening
speaker, and the lecture was meant to be broad and general.

This conference had been preceded by one some years earlier that took place
in Ireland, and it was concerned with insular art, meaning Anglo-Saxon and Irish, of
the pre-Norman period, from the sixth to the eleventh century, essentially. This was
an occasion for Irish and British scholars to come together and carry on their eternal
debates about who influenced whom and what was done by whom. This is what I
was faced with when I first came to this country in the thirties, and it was very acute
then, and I became involved in it to some extent, and here we were sixty years later
and the debate was still going on. But I always felt that what I could do in this
context was in a sense to sidestep it by concentrating on what happened on the
Continent, and to what extent the art in these dark ages in the British Isles was
reflecting and influenced by continental art, because on the whole — certainly it was

269

true in the thirties when I was here — people who were working on this early material
were archaeologists, and many of them were somewhat parochial. They didn't really
know much about what had been going on on the Continent during the same period,
and to a certain extent that's still true now. Many of the papers that were read at this
Edinburgh conference were narrow in focus: comparing two types of fibulae or two
types of ornament and so on.

I felt in my introductory statement my contribution would be to make people
aware again, as I had tried earlier, of things that had been going on on the Continent,
and I chose two elements within this insular production, which are both key elements:
interlace ornament, which is ubiquitous in this art, and images of holy persons — icons.
With regard to interlace I showed some continental monuments where interlace was
very clearly applied with an apotropaic function. With interlace there's always this
possibility of its being used to ensnare the devil, because it's so complicated. So it's
put at entrances of churches, for instance, to keep out the evil one. Of course you
have to be careful not to make every bit of interlace an apotropaic device, but to show
that it had this connotation and that this is important in many specific cases was one
of the purposes of this lecture.

The icon is interesting in the sense that the hieratic holy image only developed
on the Continent itself during these same centuries when Christian art started in the
British Isles with the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and the Irish. So that they

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imported, or were presented with by their missionaries, an art which was really quite a
recent development in the Mediterranean world itself. I showed how this icon
concept then gets reflected in the insular art, and ultimately then, in a very few closing
remarks, showed that although they are morphologically totally disparate elements,
they both have a sort of magic quality in common. The interlace can have a magic
purpose, and the icons have it, really, by their very presence. That lecture also had a
kind of polemical edge to it, although it wasn't at all like the other cases I quoted
where I did put little pinpricks in it. I just wanted to make people more aware, and,
again, it does not seem to have had much resonance. I don't follow the literature on
Anglo-Saxon and Irish archaeology very much now, but so far as I am aware, this has
had little effect.

SMITH: Does that bother you?

KITZINGER: No. The other day I had a telephone call from someone who wanted
some information and then said, "By the way, I enjoyed your article," referring to the
one that was based on this Edinburgh conference. So very occasionally you get at
least a personal comment, and I suppose people do enjoy it in a way, but it's not
something that enters into their own work.

SMITH: It sounds like most of these people are not competent to judge the
Mediterranean material, so they would have an epistemological gap.
KITZINGER: That is true in many cases, but what one would like them to do, is to

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apply it to their own material, instead of just doing a kind of taxonomy, which is really

what they mostly do — you know, classifying types.

SMITH: We were talking earlier about deconstruction, and the new, younger art

historians being less interested in the object and more interested in the theories that

they can weave around that object. Then on the other hand you have this taxonomic

approach, but I wonder to what degree that kind of polarity has been present in art

history during your lifetime, though perhaps not as dominant. Weren't there

speculators in the thirties and forties and fifties who would take some kind of

theory — Marxist theory or Freudian theory — and weave a story?

KITZINGER: Certainly there have always been the catalogers on the one hand, and

the speculators on the other; that's true.

SMITH: [Arnold] Toynbee has done this kind of thing, not in art history but in

general history, eighty years ago.

KITZINGER: The Toynbee volumes came out while I was at the British Museum, at

least the early ones, and it was very interesting, actually, to see how some of the

British scholars were stirred by this, in effect, rather un-British enterprise. The

nearest equivalent always was [Oswald] Spengler. It certainly stirred up things, and I

still think it was a very worthwhile thing to do. A lot of it was wrong, obviously, but

it stirred things up.

SMITH: I wonder to what degree we could make a connection between these

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current trends in art history with people like Pinder and Buschor, from your youth.
KITZINGER: I see what you mean, but the difference to me is that these present
trends tend to take you away from the object, whereas those two, Pinder and
Buschor, got you to the object. "Object-oriented" was a phrase that was used much
at Harvard during the period when I was teaching there, because there was so much
controversy on that very point. Harvard prided itself on being still object-oriented
when a lot of other institutions weren't, and certainly this is something that I am still
trying to defend. One thing that worries me is whether there are enough young
people now who are encouraged to recognize and develop their own sensibility. That
can only be done if you believe that form leads somewhere, and has meaning.
SMITH: What are you working on now? Do you have any current projects?
KITZINGER: Well, this Sicilian project takes all my time. Last year I relaxed too
much after the spring period when I had to deliver the fascicle, and I didn't get going
sufficiently soon on the following one, so now I am trying to get myself going on this
next one, which I don't have to deliver until next spring. A certain amount of research
does go into it, and I am trying to use it also as a vehicle to get out some of the ideas
I had developed in my own mind over all these decades, which I won't be able to
publish anymore in a systematic way. For instance, now, with Monreale, there are
certain mosaics that pose particular problems, and I am trying to make some headway
with those and then put them into this text. The text isn't all that dry; it has some

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constructive elements in it, more so perhaps now because I had published this large
volume on Monreale, with a relatively short text, in the sixties. There were lots of
things that it didn't cover, and I'm trying to supplement this now.

I always hate the word "definitive" in regard to any publication. That's a word
that gets very misused. Particularly in regard to scholarly publications, there is no
such thing as definitive. If I can still get out some of the things that I have in my files
now, so much the better. So that's what this is all about, but it takes all my time. I
have no assistance at all. I have to do all the mechanical things myself, and since I
haven't taken to computers I still type everything on my portable typewriter, and it's
published in Italian, so —
SMITH: Do you write it in English or Italian?

KITZINGER: I write the catalog in Italian and the introduction in English, and I have
a very helpful translator in Rome. But that also has to be counted into the time frame
of this, and so there is a lot of pressure there. So that's the answer to what I am
doing; I am not really doing anything else now.

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SESSION SIX: 1 JUNE, 1995
[Tape XII, Side One]

SMITH: In the previous set of sessions you had mentioned some of the reasons why
you were prepared to leave Dumbarton Oaks from a professional point of view, but
how did the position at Harvard come about? Were you recruited to go there or did
you apply for the position?

KITZINGER: No, Harvard had been without a medievalist since Wilhelm Koehler
retired, in 1954, and they had been after me, always thinking that in some way my
being on the Harvard faculty anyway, at Dumbarton Oaks, this could somehow be
arranged. There had been for many years an arrangement whereby Harvard could
invite Dumbarton Oaks scholars to teach there for a term at a time, which I had done.
Maybe I mentioned that?
SMITH: You mentioned that, yes.

KITZINGER: So there had been a lot of contact, and I had been there on a
temporary basis. What finally happened in 1966 was that Harvard got the estate of
Mrs. Kingsley Porter settled, which had been very complicated. It was always known
there was a lot of money there, and several years passed, with various people
contesting Mrs. Porter's will. Anyway, the money was finally there to establish a
university professorship in memory of Arthur Kingsley Porter, and they first offered it
to Ernst Gombrich I think, or Meyer Schapiro. There were two people ahead of me

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who turned down the offer. Then they offered it to me, and after a lot of agonizing I
decided to accept it. It was during the year in which I had already resigned as
director of studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and was at the Princeton Institute for
Advanced Study, as I have already said, to find my feet again as a scholar. During
that time I got an offer from the Institute, because Millard Meiss, who had been the
art historian on the permanent faculty, was about to retire. So I had a very agonizing
choice between the Institute and Harvard. I finally decided in favor of Harvard, partly
because of the combination that the university professorship offered, of doing just the
amount of teaching I would like to do, and no more. I didn't go there as a regular
member of the fine arts faculty. University professors are totally free to teach or not
to teach, and it was only under those circumstances that I accepted the offer.

My whole career was really the opposite of what normally happens, if it
happens at all; namely, after decades of teaching people get a chance to get a research
appointment in order to finally do the work they really want to do, and they accept it.
That happened in a number of cases at Dumbarton Oaks itself; a number of the
scholars who had permanent positions had spent decades teaching before they went
there, and the same had been true of most of the people at Princeton, in the Institute.
With me it was exactly the reverse: I had never done any teaching. By that time I
had spent more than twenty years at a research institute. To get into a regular
teaching position at that stage in life is not so easy. Of course it's not easy at any

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time, certainly not for beginners either. But it was a very unusual situation, and I
wouldn't have done it if it had meant becoming a regular member of the departmental
faculty, because it would have meant all the chores and duties, and the same teaching
load as everybody else.

My position was in some senses awkward from the beginning, because I made
it clear that I didn't want to be a regular faculty member. I was on good terms with
my art historian colleagues, but I think they probably never really were all that happy
with my taking advantage, really, of this special position. But they knew that if it
hadn't been for this particular offer of a university professorship I wouldn't have done
it. At that stage in life it was much too late. So that I think answers your question of
how this came about. I then spent these twelve years in Cambridge and wrote my
own ticket, so to speak. I did as much teaching as I wanted to do, which usually
meant a lecture course in one term, and a seminar in the other term, and it very much
focused on graduate students. I never really got seriously involved with
undergraduates.

SMITH: The graduate students take up much more time per capita.
KITZINGER: You said yesterday you would like to talk a bit about the whole
Harvard set-up. Mine was not a typical experience at all, and in a sense I was always
in an ambiguous position. But my purpose in accepting was to find a small number of
young people to whom I could pass on some of the things that I had stored up in all

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these years in Washington, and that's why I then concentrated very much on graduate
students, although Harvard always prides itself on the so-called middle-group
courses, meaning courses that are open to undergraduates and graduates and taught
by senior faculty. My coursework was always middle group. Not large, never more
than thirty, thirty-five people. My contact with undergraduates was very much
confined to those who attended these middle-group courses. They are difficult
courses to teach in that you have to be broad enough to interest the undergraduate,
and yet at the same time prepare your graduate student for more specialized work.
So that was in itself a challenge, but that's what my teaching consisted of. And I did
have a number of students who then did their theses with me.
SMITH: Senior theses, or dissertations?
KITZINGER: Ph.D.s, and senior theses too.

SMITH: Was your focus on Byzantine art? You were the medievalist, so did you
have an obligation to do the whole schmear?

KITZINGER: No, I didn't. Again, I wrote my own ticket there, and as I said
yesterday, the courses I did were really quite essential in preparing myself for this
book that I then wrote [Byzantine Art in the Making]. So it was a very selfish step.
From a purely bureaucratic point of view, it solved the problem of Harvard not having
a senior medievalist on its art faculty, but during the whole time I was there, there
was always a junior person who was teaching other medieval courses.

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I ought to say that there was one thing I found very distressing in regard to
the Harvard system. When Wilhelm Koehler retired in '54, there was no chance at
that point to appoint a new senior tenured professor because of this famous Graustein
plan which Harvard has. I don't know if you know about this. It is something that
some statistician had worked out years before, whereby every department was entitled
to a permanent appointment at stated intervals, and they were quite long intervals.
After '54, the next permanent appointment that the department was able to make in
any area was, I think, in '57, so there was a three-year gap in the first place, and then
there was a competition between the Far East, and Islam and whatever, so the
chances of a senior person being appointed in the medieval field on a permanent basis
were very uncertain. I thought that there was something wrong with that system.
SMITH: How active were you in the day to day affairs of the department?
KITZINGER: I attended departmental meetings, and also participated actively in
them, and there was a weekly lunch for faculty, which I always attended. I shouldn't
make myself out more of a hermit than I was, but I did try to stay away from
committee work and so on.

SMITH: Were you involved with the fine arts museums, the Fogg [Art Museum] and
the [Arthur M] Sackler Museum?

KITZINGER: The Sackler didn't exist at that point. One thing that I was anxious
about was to give students a chance to see more of Byzantine art — there was very

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little in Cambridge — and I arranged for a long-term loan of objects from Dumbarton
Oaks. So I did get involved in the museum in that sense. I had to get this whole
machinery going, getting this loan, getting the cases and locations, and it meant that a
number of my students were able to work on actual objects, which of course was very
much what Harvard in general wanted its fine art students to do, but it was very
difficult to do that in this particular area without this loan. So that was one way I got
involved with the museum — but all very much from a narrow, selfish point of view.
SMITH: Harvard's also famous for these kind of informal faculty cross-disciplinary
exchanges, like [W. V] Quine's Stammtisch. Were you involved with any of those
kinds of informal faculty groups?

KITZINGER: There was one which I suppose was comparable to Quine's. It was
the History of Religions Club, which had been going for quite a long time, and which
I was invited to join, and that meant a monthly gathering in someone's house. It was
very small, about eight or nine people from different departments, but all interested in
the history of religion. That I enjoyed very much, and there were people like Frank
[Moore] Cross, who was very much involved with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which of
course were very new and exciting then. On a larger scale there was a thing called
the Shop Club, which held a monthly dinner. One person gave a talk about [his or
her work], and that could be about anything.
SMITH: To what degree do you think teaching on a regular basis and being at

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Harvard might have changed the direction of your intellectual project or the scholarly

work you were producing?

KITZINGER: I think it was very much a question of being challenged to organize a

lot of material that I had accumulated over these decades, but [being at Harvard] did

not change the direction of my work; it was also too late for that.

You see, I was in my mid-fifties when I went there. As I said, this was one of the

abnormal aspects of this — for me to start teaching at that stage.

SMITH: I'd like to get a sense of how you organized your graduate seminars.

KITZINGER: That was more or less a pattern which I think people followed

generally, that you assigned topics within the general theme of the seminar to

individual students, and then spent the first four, five, six weeks' meetings doing most

of the talking yourself, while the students were supposed to prepare their papers.

During that time you also met with the students and tried to at least make sure that

those who came early were ready by the time they were called upon to lecture. Then

you got their papers and you had the sessions in the second half of the term when

these papers were presented, discussed, and criticized. That was the pattern.

SMITH: What kinds of topics did you assign?

KITZINGER: The subjects of the seminars were always related to research that I had

been doing. To find topics within that area that were suitable for study by what were,

after all, beginners was one of the main problems. I'm not sure that I can just think of

281

good examples. For instance, late antique and early Byzantine floor mosaics proved
to be a very good field for a seminar because there are a lot of very concrete, solid
monuments which people could get their teeth into. So there it was relatively easy to
find limited and manageable topics, either a particular monument or a particular
iconographic theme, or a particular type of ornament which people could work on. I
think I did floor mosaics twice during those years. Ivory carvings are another such
subject. Some graduate students did original work that was of high caliber, so a
number of published articles by students came out of these seminars.
SMITH: Were you primarily focusing on stylistic and iconographical questions?
KITZINGER: Both of those.

SMITH: So questions of patronage and workshop entered into it.
KITZINGER: They would come in, yes. Talking about patronage for instance, one
year I gave a seminar jointly with Herbert Bloch, who is both a classical philologist
and a medieval historian. He had been working on the monastery of Monte Cassino.
We tried to bring together both the literary culture of the Benedictine order and the
art, and that was a useful collaboration. Another seminar was on Charlemagne and
members of his circle — their role as patrons. So yes, certainly there were seminars
where iconography and style were keyed to a broader historical phenomenon.
SMITH: What languages did you expect your graduate students to work in when
they entered the class?

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KITZINGER: The fine arts department at Harvard always had and I suppose still
has, a Christmas party at which the students do a sort of skit in which they make fun
of their professors. I remember one such skit in which I figured, impersonated by a
student of course, in which I said, "Well, if you don't know Coptic you can't go into
my seminar." [laughter] Which was certainly an exaggeration. I never expected
anyone to know Coptic, because I didn't know it myself. But I soon learned that to
say that you had to know Greek in order to work on Byzantine things wouldn't get
you anywhere, so I was I think from very early on quite modest in what I theoretically
would have wanted my students to be able to do.

It was a general departmental requirement that they had to have a reading
knowledge of French or German. Latin you encountered quite often. Then there
were always people with an Orthodox family background, who knew some Greek
through the liturgy and so on, or were very much interested in getting that. At least
they had the motivation if not actually the knowledge. So I usually had some students
with that background, and then I tried to assign papers that took advantage of that.
SMITH: You had mentioned yesterday that it was in your second year of teaching
that the student disturbances began, in '68. How did that affect your teaching and
your relationship with art history students?

KITZINGER: Well, the people who were interested in working with me, graduate
students, were usually rather apolitical, so personally I had very little by way of

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confrontation within my own group of students. But of course the general situation
at the university you couldn't escape; it was quite dramatic. I remember when Lionel
Trilling was giving a series of lectures at Harvard. On one of those evenings there
was a terrific confrontation between the rebellious students and the police in
Cambridge. Our house was within walking distance of Harvard Yard. We were
supposed to go to a party at one of the Harvard houses after the lecture, but we were
confronted with a police barrier and never got there. We returned home only to find
our house filled with other people who weren't able to get across this police barrier!
They were hoping to spend the night in our house. So it was a kind of revolutionary
situation.

It must have been during that time . . . there was this professor, [Richard J]
Herrnstein, at Harvard, who collaborated with [Charles Murray] on this recent book
called The Bell Curve. They came up with theses which were very controversial,
about IQ in relation to race. Herrnstein published an article during that
period — whether it was '68 or perhaps the following year I can't remember — and he
was violently attacked by the students. Then there was a statement by a number of
faculty people who defended him simply in terms of academic freedom and the
freedom of speech. I signed that, together with a lot of others, and as a result I then
got challenged by students, who asked me to please come and meet with them to
discuss this, which I didn't do.

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SMITH: How long did it take to quiet down?

KITZINGER: Well, Nathan Pusey, who was then president of Harvard, was close to
retirement, and he was very much embattled. He didn't help matters by being very
conservative politically and defending the Vietnam war. But the appointment of his
successor, Derek Bok, was very much a matter of turning over a new leaf and
creating a new atmosphere for a relationship between the administration and the
students I think he became president in 71, and then things calmed down a lot.
SMITH: Putting those disturbances aside: Sixty-eight also represents the
epistemological changes that occurred in Anglo-American and continental academia.
I wonder, to what degree did students in the seventies in your field start showing
interest in new kinds of topics and methodologies and theoretical approaches?
KITZINGER: Well, Harvard's strong traditional interest in connoisseurship was a
source of unease among students at that point, and we then had these sessions on
style which the students initiated. That was one forum in which these new issues
played some part. I suppose students started reading some of the structuralists; one
was very conscious of [Claude] Levi-Strauss. Not the deconstructionists yet.
SMITH: Levi-Strauss and [Louis] Althusser were both rather influential in the first
part of the seventies.

KITZINGER: Yes, that one was conscious of, but I can't say that it led to a
confrontation.

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SMITH: But would these issues get raised in seminars?

KITZINGER: I can't say that they ever did. At least I don't remember any case

where they were raised.

SMITH: So your students were continuing to do what we could call "traditional" art

history?

KITZINGER. Yes, very much so.

SMITH: This relates to what you were saying yesterday about anachronism, in a

sense, because for something to be anachronistic, then there have to be these major

changes in approach.

KITZINGER: Yes, but this is very much a question of hindsight now, isn't it? I

mean, in the early seventies one could still quite cheerfully do what one had been

doing.

SMITH: Right. So you retire in 79, just as poststructuralism is beginning to enter

into American academia.

KITZINGER: Yes, and as I said yesterday, looking back now, it is very clear to me

that I was being very traditionalist in my thinking and in the problems that I was

pursuing — this whole idea of the artist-creator and so on. But that is really in

retrospect; I wasn't conscious of it, and I wasn't trying to keep up with the literature

in that sense.

Did my membership in the German order of merit come up in our past

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conversations?

SMITH: No we haven't discussed that. The Pour le Merited
KITZINGER: Yes, I was elected in the early eighties. The order was started by
Frederick the Great in the eighteenth century as a military thing, and it is now purely a
matter of arts and sciences. Thirty German scholars and thirty non-German. It is a
great honor to be elected, but they made a point quite clearly to make amends to
refugees, people who had left Germany. I think if I hadn't been one of those they
would never have elected me, but having been offered this, it was very hard to refuse,
because it would then look as though I was being irreconcilable. So I accepted.
They have two meetings a year, one in the spring and one in the autumn.
Actually the spring one has just happened and I didn't go. The autumn meetings are
more informal than the spring ones, and there is always a topic to discuss. One year I
suggested as a topic the problem of the older scholar — because by definition these are
older people — and his relation to the younger generation. Having suggested this, then
of course you get saddled with actually running it, which is what I then had to do.
For that I said I would concentrate on my own field, so I talked about the old art
history and the new art history in that setting, and this is where I had to read people
like Griselda Pollock. I also remember reading a thing by [Roland] Barthes, which
seemed to me so amateurish from the point of view of what he said concretely about
art objects, and so factually wrong, that I was very much put off. But the point is that

287

for that particular purpose I did a certain amount of reading, but I have never

systematically read the new art history. Actually this discussion turned out to be

interesting, particularly because there were scientists and humanists together, and to

the scientists this was totally a nonproblem, a nonsubject. This generational clash just

didn't exist for them. That was interesting.

SMITH: But for the humanities there were strong parallels?

KITZINGER: Oh, yes

SMITH: But you did say that your students were largely, as most Harvard students

were, object oriented rather than theory oriented?

KITZINGER: Yes, I would say so. And the faculty did little to change that.

SMITH: So in 79, you're sixty-seven years old, and you decided to retire at that

point.

KITZINGER: Yes. Of course the age limit still existed, which it doesn't anymore.

SMITH: Oh, so you had to retire?

KITZINGER: You could stay on till seventy, and I decided not to. It was partly due

to personal problems, but I said I would see my graduate students who were writing

theses through, and that kept me in contact for several more years, and quite a lot of

work. The last Ph.D. thesis was not completed until the mid-eighties.

SMITH: How many dissertations did you supervise in your twelve years?

KITZINGER: I would say about eighteen, something like that.

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SMITH: Did they all go on to academic careers, teaching medieval art?

KITZINGER: Yes, many of them did. Of course they didn't all get jobs; the job

situation became so difficult, but some of them are teaching, yes. And of course there

are always some people also who drop out altogether.

SMITH: Yes, that's inevitable. Were there any dissertations that you felt particularly

proud of, that you supervised that you thought really made an essential contribution

to the field?

KITZINGER: Oh yes, there are some that were published as books, but not without

a good deal of further work. Dissertations that are published as dissertations are

usually not so good. On the whole I think my twelve years accomplished what I had

wanted to accomplish, namely to make some contribution to the next generation.

[Tape XII, Side Two]

SMITH: Perhaps we should go back to Dumbarton Oaks. I suppose the place to

start would be with the Blisses and the degree to which you and the other staff there

interacted with them.

KITZINGER: I thought I would draw attention first to an article I wrote, in '62 I

think it was, which summarizes my concept of the place. Before we get to the

Blisses, I want to put on record that I had my own very definite concept of what the

place should be — not that it ever was. Of course by the time I wrote that article I had

already been there for twenty years, so I was very familiar with both what it was and

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what it wasn't. I think there are certain built-in problems for a pure research institute
in the United States. Probably it has something to do with my European background
that I was very much aware of this, but I think it is objectively a problem that under
the American system you really go straight from being a graduate student to being a
teacher. What is lacking, or what is normally not there, is this period in a young
scholar's development, between, say, twenty-five and thirty, where he can supposedly
mature as a scholar before he starts giving out his accumulated wisdom. What that
means in the case of a research institute is that you have a very hard time attracting
young faculty because they feel they are going to miss the boat if they don't go
straight into teaching.

In the case of Dumbarton Oaks this was aggravated by the fact that it was,
and still is, separated from its mother institution by four hundred miles. To operate a
research institution in this kind of isolation, and particularly in a place like
Washington, where government and politics are so much in the foreground, was
extremely difficult. Dumbarton Oaks gets compared with the Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton, and of course they are comparable in the sense that they both are
dedicated to research, but Princeton has the university next door, and of course it
covers all fields; in that sense it's not comparable to Dumbarton Oaks. But these
institutes that are devoted to research have a very hard time when they are totally
separated from the university.

290

This is a kind of preamble to talking about the Blisses. It was very much a
question of Mrs. Bliss's passion for collecting precious and lovely objets d'art. So the
whole thing grew around her collection, which was and still is a very fine collection,
but very much governed by aesthetic interests. When the Blisses made their gift to
Harvard in 1940, it comprised this very beautiful estate, with its gardens, which Mrs.
Bliss had developed; her collection of Byzantine art; and a library which had been
built very much around the collection, very much concentrated on Byzantine art.

The terms of the gift specified that it was to be an institute for study of
Byzantine and medieval humanities. So there was some vagueness right there at the
beginning, accentuated by the fact that when you study the deeds of gift and the
Blisses' wills, which I have, the word Byzantium never occurs. In other words, they
gave this to Harvard with no legal obligation on the university's part to confine it to
any particular subject. There's a big inscription in stone facing Thirty-second Street,
the main entrance of Dumbarton Oaks, which says that this institute is devoted to
Byzantine and medieval humanities, but that, so far as I know, is the only
documentary evidence that this is what the institute was to be about. So there is a
constitutional weakness there.

Then Mr. Bliss developed a parallel interest in pre-Columbian art. He
accumulated a very fine collection, which was first exhibited at the National Gallery in
Washington. Mrs. Bliss had developed the gardens, and in connection with that had

291

collected rare books on flowers, gardens, and garden architecture, so there was the
Garden Library. They also arranged for their own burials on the grounds, and
Harvard accepted all this. You couldn't very well sell the land with the tombs there,
so the place was permanently tied to these two people and their memory.

People have said it was very much still like an eighteenth-century court of
enlightened absolutism. Certainly Mrs. Bliss had that concept of her own role.
Harvard accepted all this, together with a lot of money — not to mention the money
still expected after the founders' deaths — and then was faced with the task of making
an academic institute out of it. The ambiguities have pursued the place ever since.
The pre-Columbian component was added in the early sixties. Mrs. Bliss died in
1969, but the Garden Library had already been part of the institution. One of my
colleagues called the whole thing "a dog's breakfast."
SMITH: A dog's breakfast?

KITZINGER: Which is a British expression for some sort of mixture that doesn't
really make sense in terms of ordinary human consumption, [laughter] At first
Harvard tried to run it with scholars borrowed from elsewhere. The senior scholars in
the first year were Henri Focillon, who was a very prominent French art historian who
was in exile during the war, at Yale, and Charles Rufus Morey from Princeton. They
had five or six junior fellows who were invited to work with them, but with no real
focus or program. Then Harvard delegated Wilhelm Koehler, who was their

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medievalist, to go down there, and it was he really who first established a proper
research program at Dumbarton Oaks. This was the second year for Dumbarton
Oaks under Harvard, and that was the year I was invited as one of the junior fellows,
of whom there were six or seven.

Koehler established a program which clearly showed how definitely the
original focus was on art and archaeology. Since in wartime it was physically
impossible to work with material in Europe, he devised a program whereby the junior
fellows divided up the various Mediterranean regions among themselves and made an
inventory of the material that had been reported in excavation reports and in
archaeological journals, for their particular region. This was a very fruitful idea
because the study of early Christian art had been very much confined to what we
called at that time "roving objects," that is, objects that had happened to survive in
church treasures, or in libraries, which usually had no firm date and no firm
provenance, so the whole field was sort of wobbly as far as the base was concerned.
By concentrating instead on material that had actually been found in different parts of
the Mediterranean world, you could create a much more solid basis for the study of
the development, of architecture primarily of course, but also of sculpture, painting,
mosaic, and so on. This is where my interest in floor mosaics came from, because
very often all that remained on a particular site were the foundations of a building and
the floors, not the superstructure.

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Parallel with this Archives Project was another project for those fellows who
were not art historians or archaeologists, but philologists. It was called fontes, and
the idea was to systematically screen early Christian and early Byzantine literature for
references to art. How totally the focus was still on art is shown by the fact that the
non-art historians were also made to work on material that ultimately would be used
by art historians. This is where what I've said earlier about the uncertain status of the
scholar between twenty-five and thirty comes in. These fellows then were made to
devote time to projects that were not their own. It was supposed to be on a half-time
basis; the other half of one's time was supposed to be spent on one's own work. But
the very idea of devoting time to institutional tasks rather than one's own work was
problematic. Some of these young people worked very well within this scheme, but
others were kind of restless and resented this from the start, and it built up a good
deal of tension. For me it was ideal. I had been working a lot with "roving objects,"
and here was a solid base, very much in the area of my interest, particularly because
the material that was yielded by the sites in a given area included a lot of ornament,
and so it gave rise to problems that were specifically stylistic.

SMITH: What were the factors involved in the decision to convert these fellowships
into a permanent faculty, as they called it?

KITZINGER: Koehler's approach was almost bound to fail under the American
system. There was a good deal of resistance, and he didn't get along with the Blisses,

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so he lasted only about two years. This was the latter part of the war, and things
were extremely difficult. I had been a fellow for two years, and then went into the
OSS. It became very hard to recruit people. The situation changed only with the end
of the war, when Friend was invited to be the director of studies. It was he who
persuaded Harvard to create a permanent faculty instead of this fellows system, and
several of the then fellows were made assistant professors, including myself. So the
whole hierarchic system of faculty appointments was introduced from Harvard and
senior appointments were made of permanent faculty. There were then three or four
permanent members of the faculty, and four term appointments.

But the difficulties weren't really resolved with that. First of all, a lot of young
people wanted to teach. They didn't want to be in a purely research setting, and of
course being away from the mother institution by that much distance, this wasn't so
easy. It was then that the system was created that people could be invited by the
appropriate Harvard department for a term. But three terms had to elapse before the
same person could be asked again, because one was afraid, and quite rightly, that
Harvard would just get junior faculty on the cheap that way, paid by Dumbarton
Oaks. But there was also, as I say, this desire on the part of quite a number of the
young people of wanting to teach and not being able to do it without moving house. I
did it during that period only once. I then did it again later, but it was an upheaval for
the family, to go away for three months. It was not a satisfactory scheme for any

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junior faculty member who wanted to teach, so a number of people left. They felt

they might be missing the bus insofar as openings for junior people were concerned.

SMITH: Were there any feelers put out with, say, Johns Hopkins?

KITZINGER: Well, this was always a possibility, to use a local university, and Johns

Hopkins of course was the obvious major university within easy distance. Some

[collaboration] did develop to some extent later, but not at that time. This was a

built-in problem, and in the long run the permanent faculty proved also difficult to

maintain.

SMITH: People kept leaving?

KITZINGER: Yes.

SMITH: Milton Anastos stayed there quite a long time, didn't he? And you did,

certainly.

KITZINGER: I did, yes, and for me the whole thing happened to fit both my

preparation and my interests, but for a number of people [this wasn't the case],

including Milton Anastos. He decided to accept a job at UCLA. So the permanent

faculty didn't prove to be that permanent.

When I became director of studies, I was very much aware of the difficulty of
getting any help for the more routine aspects of one's work. The two main
institutional activities for the faculty were publications and the library. I spent an
enormous amount of time in those years correcting other people's proofs; they were

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articles or books submitted for Dumbarton Oaks to publish, and someone had to do
the routine work. I never had enough help with the editing and publishing. So there
again what was missing was this category of young scholars for whom this sort of
work was accepted as routine at that stage in their life.

And there was always the problem of a scholar-librarian, as distinct from a
library science person. For a while such a person was found, but again it didn't last,
and this was a period when the library really was being built up. When Harvard got
Dumbarton Oaks the only sizable collection of books was in the field of art and
archaeology. What we did during those years after the war, when it became possible
again to acquire books on a large scale from Europe, was to build up the library by
means of a library committee on which all the faculty sat, and on which they spent an
inordinate amount of time. People now don't realize what was done by the
supposedly creative faculty doing their own work during those years.
SMITH: Kurt Weitzmann in his interview actually took credit for most of the work
building up the Dumbarton Oaks [library].

KITZINGER: Weitzmann always represents Dumbarton Oaks as though it were a
Princeton outpost; this is simply not true. It's true that Morey was, as I say, in that
first year, one of the scholars, and Friend was very important for a number of years,
but Weitzmann totally underrates the role of Koehler during those first years, when
the program was first established. Koehler certainly didn't last, but he laid a very

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important foundation.

SMITH: When you became director of studies, in 1955, did you have a plan of action
or a goal for transforming the faculty program?

KITZINGER: One of my main convictions was that an institution such as Dumbarton
Oaks could only justify itself by its publications, and it ought to be able to undertake
large projects that an individual scholar couldn't accomplish on his own. The latter
point had been the basis also of Koehler's idea, with his Archives Project. In wartime
conditions it could only be done in that way, but after the war one could go out and
do large things. At the end of my tenure as director of studies I said that I never
really achieved this in the way I had hoped — really large basic publications. When
you think of the sort of thing that the German Archaeological Institute had been doing
for over a hundred years, or the Monumenta Germaniae, with their basic source
publications and so on, this was extremely difficult under the Dumbarton Oaks
system.

I got the publications program more firmly established and quantitatively the
output increased, and the Dumbarton Oaks Papers, which originally was just a
volume that was put out when enough material was there, became an annual and has
been an annual ever since. The other thing of course was fieldwork, taking over the
work particularly on Byzantine monuments in Istanbul, which originally had been
started by Thomas Whittemore and his Byzantine Institute, which was simply he

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himself and his financial backers. These were large projects that Dumbarton Oaks
became involved with, and then published. So to some extent Dumbarton Oaks
realized what I felt and still feel, is the basic task of such institutions, but not nearly to
the extent it should have.

SMITH: What was your relationship with Paul [A] Underwood? He was the field
director for most of your tenure.

KITZINGER: Whittemore died in 1950 I think, and Paul Underwood was appointed
his successor just to keep the project going, because the whole thing hinged on good
relations with the Turks. So Dumbarton Oaks "loaned" Paul Underwood to the
Byzantine Institute, which was not really an institute at all, and then in due course the
whole operation was taken over by Dumbarton Oaks.

SMITH: It struck me that Dumbarton Oaks had a plethora of directors, in a sense:
you had a director of studies, you had a director of the museum, a field director —
KITZINGER: Well, I was coming to that. All this time there was a director, John
Thacher, who had been a protege of the Blisses. He was really installed by them right
at the beginning as an administrative head, but at the insistence of Mrs. Bliss he was
called director, which was in a sense a pity. He actually had studied art history at the
Courtauld Institute in London and had a degree from there, so he had an art history
background. But he was in effect a wealthy amateur, very much from the same social
class as the Blisses themselves and very much their creature. But he was very

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intelligent, very efficient, and he ran the place very well for thirty years, from 1 94 1 to
the late sixties.

I think the reason for his success was that he didn't claim to be able to do
things which he couldn't do. He allowed the director of studies, first in the person of
Friend, then for a brief period Sirarpie Der Nersessian, who was on the faculty, and
then I, to be the scholarly head of the institution. In other words, what it really
amounted to was a diarchy — two heads, side by side. I still think, and I thought at
the time, that this was the proper administrative setup for Dumbarton Oaks.
SMITH: So you had the advantage of not really having to worry about the minutiae
of the budget?

KITZINGER: Yes, not at all; in that sense it was ideal. It worked between Jack
Thacher and A. M. Friend, and it worked between Jack Thacher and me. It was very
much like a marriage — either it works or it doesn't. It happened to work with these
particular individuals. Then afterwards it didn't work. The whole problem became
more difficult with the establishment of these other non-Byzantine components within
Dumbarton Oaks, the pre-Columbian and the Garden Library, which of course
complicated the administrative setup considerably. It was still intended that
Byzantium should remain the main focus, and simply in terms of the annual budget it
had by far the lion's share and I think it still has, but with these other parts coming
into the picture the administrative side increased obviously, and it became more

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difficult to unite everything under one head.

SMITH: Were you also the director of studies for the pre-Columbian component?
KITZINGER: No. Just at the time I wrote that article about Dumbarton Oaks, we
established the "Center for Byzantine Studies." That was done purposely in order to
maintain the identity of the principal objective of the institution. (The term was
quietly dropped in the late seventies during Giles Constable's directorship.) I was the
director of studies for this center, and I had nothing to do with the other two aspects.
One fateful step was then taken by Jack Thacher's successor, who was William [R]
Tyler. He was actually a godson of the Blisses, the son of one of their closest friends,
Royall Tyler, who had been a very good amateur scholar in the Byzantine field and
had written quite important publications. Well, William Tyler had spent his
professional life as a diplomat; he had been in the Foreign Service.
[Tape XIII, Side One]

KITZINGER: William Tyler, being used to a tidy State Department organization,
wanted these three branches of Dumbarton Oaks to be on an even footing, so each
had its director of studies, and this has been the situation ever since. The result is that
the director of Byzantine studies doesn't have the kind of status anymore that Friend
and I had. Quite specifically, when I was invited to become director of studies, there
was only one condition that I insisted on, namely that I had to be a member of what
was then called the administrative committee, which was the committee that dealt

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with money. I insisted that I had to be a member of that, so in concrete terms, the
role of the director of studies became equal, really, to that of the administrative
director, who always had been a member of this administrative committee. Under this
new setup, with three directors of studies, this was not continued. In effect, it de-
graded the director of studies. In an administrative sense, this was a very important
move, which has never been reversed.

The seventies were a very difficult period. Mrs. Bliss had died, President
Pusey had retired, Jack Thacher had been replaced by William Tyler, and upon his
retirement Harvard decided to appoint a scholar-director in the person of Giles
Constable, and that I resisted as much as I could, but not effectively. Giles Constable
was a good scholar in his own right, but I simply rejected the idea of a single scholar-
director who would run this triple show, along with being the scholarly head of the
Center for Byzantine Studies. Constable was not a Byzantinist.

So this was the point where I resigned from Dumbarton Oaks, with a lot of
misgivings and unhappiness. In effect, this all goes back to the Blisses' lack of focus.
I remember I had one interview with President Bok at that point, which I solicited, at
which I pleaded for the continuation of the diarchy, because as I said, there are two
irreconcilable tasks: the running of this triple show and heading the scholarly work of
the Byzantine Center. This simply should not be done by the same person.

I always cited and still do cite the experience with a lot of big hospitals which

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have done exactly the opposite: they have established diarchies to separate the
extremely complicated administrative work of any big hospital from the strictly
medical and professional part. I'm sure there are cases in America, certainly in this
country, where this has been done, and I'm sure the same thing happens in a lot of
other areas, so the case for a dual leadership is I think very strong, provided you have
good relations between the two people. This existed in my time, but admittedly could
never be taken for granted.

SMITH: What was your relationship to the museum collection, in terms of
individuals, or again in terms of policies?

KITZINGER: Well, the collection was left to the director. Jack Thacher had very
much the same interests and same tastes as the Blisses, and so there was good
continuity there, and also with William Tyler, who as I say was the son of the man
who had helped the Blisses establish their collection. But when it came to
acquisitions and so on, I certainly was always consulted. In retrospect, the most
controversial acquisition was the large silver treasure I mentioned yesterday, which
turned out to have been smuggled from Turkey. This is still a running sore, and it has
made things difficult for the directors.

SMITH: They weren't concerned about how the Turkish government felt?
KITZINGER: Well, in retrospect this seems quite obvious, but at the time it wasn't.
This was very much a transition period in which some people had become very much

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concerned about importing antiquities, and other people were still in the traditional

mode that a museum gets what it can, wherever it comes from. So long as you get it

legally from a dealer in New York, it's okay. The Metropolitan Museum has

maintained this position all the way through, and some of the other big museums have

too. But one has become much more conscious of this problem than one was in the

early sixties. In retrospect, certainly this was a mistake.

SMITH: Were you also in a sense directing the fieldwork?

KITZINGER: No, there was a faculty member, and that was Paul Underwood, until

he died. There was a committee on fieldwork just as there was a committee for the

library, and the director of studies was involved in all this.

SMITH: Was your concern then that the fieldwork should lead to publications? I

know in '58 you had Robert [L] Van Nice begin an architectural survey of the Hagia

Sophia.

KITZINGER: Well, it wasn't begun then, it was taken over from before. The

architectural survey of Hagia Sophia was undertaken originally by Dean Emerson at

MIT, and Van Nice had been hired by Emerson to do the actual work in Istanbul.

Then in '58 this whole project was taken over by Dumbarton Oaks, and it became

something of an albatross.

SMITH: In what sense?

KITZINGER: It swallowed a lot of money, because it required more and more

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assistance for Van Nice in order to cope with it. He had a large setup within
Dumbarton Oaks — a drafting workshop with architectural draftsmen and so on. It
ultimately did at least part of what it was supposed to do; it got out a monumental set
of plates with ground plans and elevations of the building. The idea was that if the
building collapsed, one could, with the help of these drawings, rebuild it. It's actually
a miracle that the building stands, with all the earthquakes that have happened since
the sixth century, when it was built. So to that extent the project has achieved its
purpose. What Van Nice never did was to write a text to go with it, to actually
verbalize the structural history of the building, which is a very complicated one; that
simply wasn't something that he was able to do, but the documentation he did
establish. Certainly as director of studies one was involved with that and with the
work in the other churches and other monuments in Istanbul and elsewhere. So this
was a very important part of it.

Perhaps this is the point at which I should talk about the role of art and
archaeology within the setup. I talked about the general problems of a research
institute under the American system, and I talked about the particular problems that
were created by the Blisses' lack of focus you might say, but this is the third aspect, in
my view, that is important in the history of Dumbarton Oaks as a Harvard institution.
As I say, the Blisses' concept certainly was that art was the central subject, because
there was the collection, and the library had been developed around it, but on the

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other hand there was no documentation other than that inscription on Thirty-second
Street — "Byzantine and medieval humanities" — so there was always the idea that art
should be put into a larger context. That certainly was my idea too, that Dumbarton
Oaks should be a kind of test-tube experiment in cultural history. Byzantium is
particularly suited to this, because art has a very intimate relation there — more so than
in most western medieval societies — with the central purposes of the state, and
theology was a crucial aspect of both. So it was a very good way in which to study
the relations between art and society, intellectual history, social history, and so on.
That was and to my mind still is the real thing that this institution should be doing.

What's happened over time is that art has diminished more and more and the
other fields have come out on top. This problem existed from the beginning almost,
and I remember this very well. Koehler had his whole program very much focused on
art and archaeology, with other people who were not in the field contributing to it,
and he ran into considerable opposition. First there was Edward Kennard Rand. He
was a medieval philologist and paleographer who had written a fundamental book on
the same group of manuscripts on which Koehler had done his main work, namely
Carolingian manuscripts of Tours. Koehler and Rand had come to very different
conclusions. It's a classic case where the art historian was able to show that things
paleographers had been doing on their own were wrong because they weren't taking
the art into account. Certainly in this particular case the art historian had won and the

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paleographer had lost, but Rand was a very well known and very learned man who
was on the Harvard faculty and he didn't like what was happening at Dumbarton
Oaks. Then the other person, who was actually a visiting scholar, was George La
Piana, a medieval church historian. He was a very good scholar, but he didn't like this
concentration on art at all, and did his best to paint a negative image of what was
happening at Dumbarton Oaks.

So the conflict between art history as an autonomous discipline and the other
fields was there almost from the beginning. It was submerged to some extent in
Friend's period, because his approach to art was so much bound up with theology that
it silenced a lot of that criticism. With the general developments that we talked about
yesterday, what's happened to art history and to art as an autonomous subject in the
seventies, this problem has come very much more to the fore. I can put it most
concretely by citing an article by Giles Constable that he published in the Dumbarton
Oaks Papers. The article concerned the role of archaeology in Dumbarton Oaks and
attacked what Giles called "unbridled archaeology." So you can see how this became
an open conflict, and what's happened under his regime and his successor's regime
now, is that the role of archaeology and art history altogether is very much reduced.
SMITH: During your period you had Anastos, [Francis] Dvornik, and [Romilly]
Jenkins who were doing philology or history. What was their relationship? Was this
a friendly collaborative relationship between the art history and the other types of

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history?

KITZINGER: Yes. Anastos, for instance, was very attached to Friend, and of course
Friend's type of art history, which was very much bound up with theology, helped
there. I suppose Anastos didn't like my type of art history so much, and then he very
soon left. But certainly with Jenkins there was no problem, and Dvornik was a very
smooth diplomat. So, no, I don't think there was any real conflict there, but as I say,
what happened to art history in the seventies certainly has been a major factor, and
Dumbarton Oaks, far from trying to modify this or to attenuate it, has acclimatized
itself. The present director is a medieval social historian with little interest in art or
archaeology.

The post of director of studies for the Byzantine field was abolished, really,
under Giles Constable, who wanted to have things totally in his own hands, and it was
reestablished a few years ago by Angeliki E. Laiou, the present director. She actually
appointed an art historian because she realized that the art field, particularly in
relation to the collection, wasn't properly taken care of, so now there is a director of
studies who actually is an art historian, but he accepted the job only for a limited time.
He's a former student of mine. I think this is his last year now, and I don't know
what'll happen next. In any case he is one of three, because the Garden Library and
the pre-Columbian collection have their own directors of studies, so he hasn't got the
clout that he ought to have.

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There's an annual symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, and the latest one was on
Palestine. Reading the program, when I think of the archaeology and the art that's
come to light there, particularly in Jordan — the symposium explicitly included Jordan
as well as Israel and the West Bank — there was one lecture out often on art; it was
all about the social history and economics and so on. There's nothing wrong with that
in itself, but in terms of what the tradition and the original purpose of Dumbarton
Oaks was, and how much new archaeological material there is in this particular area,
this is really incredible.

SMITH: Yesterday you mentioned that your project on the mosaics of Norman Sicily
was a 1950s art-historical project. I wonder to what degree did you and your
colleagues at Dumbarton Oaks actually define through your activities what proper art-
historical work should be in the 1950s?

KITZINGER: Particularly in relation to Dumbarton Oaks, as I said earlier, the
concept was to do big things that an individual alone couldn't do: source
publications, large publications which quite often go beyond one individual's capacity,
and certainly his financial possibilities. The Sicilian mosaic project, as conceived at
the time, certainly required an institutional backing, which Dumbarton Oaks originally
gave, and which now, for this rather skeletal publication, is provided by the Academy
in Palermo. The same goes for texts, and the publication of critical editions of
Byzantine writers, which Dumbarton Oaks has done quite a lot. So that was the

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idea — source publications, and possibly large syntheses. There was always the idea of
writing the history of Byzantine civilization, but as I say, I never believed in these
"definitive" studies.

SMITH: You also mentioned yesterday that you had to leave Dumbarton Oaks in
order to find your feet as a scholar, even though the foundations were provided by
your work there.

KITZINGER: No, I meant that specifically in relation to my mental condition in the
mid-sixties, having done this job by that time for ten years and finding that I had just
spent too much time on other people's work. We talked about how much the
publications involved, just in terms of physical time, and I was also supervising the
work of the junior fellows, and there was the library and so on. It was an awful lot of
scholarly administration as distinct from the institutional administration that Jack
Thacher did. It had taken so much of my time that I felt in a way that I'd given the
best years of my life to the institution. I was approaching my mid-forties when I got
the job. From the mid-forties to the mid-fifties is a very important period in one's
biological capacity. That's also why I then felt that I couldn't accept the university
professorship without all the selfish provisos that I added to it. I felt I had done my
bit for the institution.

SMITH: I think actually I've run out of questions, but I wonder if you have any
further comments that you've wanted to make.

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KITZINGER: Well, I'll probably have afterthoughts, as one usually does on these
occasions. I'm not sure I got it into a tidy picture, but I think I have more or less
covered the main things.

I talked about the decision I had to make in '66, that year at Princeton,
whether to accept the university professorship at Harvard or accept the professorship
at the Institute in Princeton, and one major reason for deciding against Princeton and
for Harvard was that I felt I could continue to play a part in the destinies of
Dumbarton Oaks, which, after all, I had given a major part of my life to, and which at
that point was really in a very difficult situation. In retrospect, I might as well have
gone to Princeton. What I was able to do after the late sixties was very little. Under
the Bok regime the institution went a different way, and what I was fighting for, this
continued diarchy, I wasn't able to [realize].

SMITH: During your period at Dumbarton Oaks, you were doing a lot of significant
scholarship. I just wonder, in practical terms, how you divided your work week.
How much time were you able to give to the research projects that you undertook?
KITZINGER: You mean while being director of studies?
SMITH: Yes. You were producing throughout that whole period.
KITZINGER: Well, not all that much. The essential work, having to do with the cult
of images, was work that I had done before. Certainly the preceding years, the Friend
years, let us say, when I was more or less left to my own devices, had been very

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fruitful. Of course the Sicilian interest came out of that, but that was Friend's doing,
because he wanted that. And my interest in the birth of the icon developed in those
years. I mentioned Pevsner and the Pelican History of Art. I realized that I couldn't
do the kind of handbook that was needed for the Pevsner series, but the idea for
Byzantine Art in the Making really originated there, and I became interested in the
icon as the crucial new achievement of the early period, from total rejection of the
image to an almost unprecedented acceptance of the image as an approach to the
deity. That whole idea developed during those years, though I wasn't able to write
the book until much later. The years preceding my directorship were very fruitful, in
my own terms. But after I became director of studies, no, I wasn't able to do very
much.

SMITH: This sounds actually very typical of the American system, where professors
or scholars are torn between their research and their administrative responsibilities.
KITZINGER: Yes, and of course it was not expected at Dumbarton Oaks because
just like at the Institute at Princeton, people were supposed to have all the time for
their own work, and that certainly wasn't true for the director of studies. I really
spent most of my time on the publications, on the library, on the fieldwork, committee
meeting after committee meeting and so on, and all this somebody had to organize.
And so this is why I said that I had to find my feet again. Towards the end I really
felt I had done enough.

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But you asked how I divided my time. I can still see myself in the late
afternoon, after everyone had gone. From five to seven in the evening was the time
when I was able to do some of my own work, but it was very much at the expense of
family. I established a system whereby I took off Wednesday afternoons. My wife
and I always did something on Wednesday afternoon. On a summer day we went out
to the great falls of the Potomac; we had lovely walks there. Or in winter we would
go to a museum or an exhibition or something. So this I established as a rule:
Wednesday afternoon I was not there. But it meant instead that I worked all day
Saturday, when there was no staff, and some of my own work was done on
Saturdays, and Sundays too. My wife can tell you a thing or two about this; this was
a time when the children were young, and she felt that they didn't see enough of their
father.

SMITH: This is a problem that has been built into the way we organize professional
life.

KITZINGER: Of course to some extent it's built into scholarly work as such; it never
ends. It's not a nine-to-five thing.

SMITH: Well, let me ask you in conclusion what you feel your major breakthroughs
were, and where you feel future generations should be picking up from what you've
done.
KITZINGER: Well, I think the essential thing, in retrospect, has been to maintain the

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focus on Byzantine art, which was an extraordinary achievement within the overall
medieval period. As I said earlier, art was such a central element within Byzantium
and it had a one-thousand-year history which was so widely different from western
medieval art. I tried first of all to help clarify its development, and to account for its
development to some extent in terms of factors outside the art, but also at the same
time I tried to clarify what happens within the art itself, but always concentrating very
much on its early development, which I think is crucial.
SMITH: The third to seventh century, then?

KITZINGER: Yes, and neglecting really the very late period; the last two or three
hundred years I had rather little to do with. If you ask what I think [is important], it
would be to maintain the focus on art as art, and at the same time to help throw light
on that through factors outside of the art field.

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APPENDIX

An Autobiographical Sketch
Beginnings: Munich and Rome

It was customary on rainy or wintery Sunday mornings for our parents to take
us children to one of the Munich museums — the Alte or Neue Pinakothek, the
Deutsche Museum, the Volkerkunde Museum, the Glyptothek, the Staatsgalerie, the
Bayerische Nationalmuseum, etc. Why was it that with me the Alte Pinakothek
"took" as none of the other museums did, not even the Deutsche Museum, the science
and technology museum then recently opened and a spectacular success? (I
remember a cartoon of the period showing two Munich burghers conversing over
their beer mugs and one saying to the other in good Bavarian dialect, "Ah well, all
that fuss over the Deutsche Museum won't last: Who today still talks about the
Pinakothek?") For some obscure reason it was the early German and Netherlandish
paintings that particularly fascinated me — the Diirer Apostles, Roger van der
Weyden's Columba Altar, the Cologne "Veronica," Griinewald's St. Mauritius, and so
on. By the time of my bar mitzvah — liberal as our family was this milestone was still
observed — it must have been widely recognized among relatives and my parents'
friends that I was seriously interested in the history of art, for among the presents I
received, books in that field were prominent. Georg Dehio's Geschichte der
deutschen Kunst, then recently published, became an ardently treasured possession.
By the time I went to university in 193 1 I had long since decided that I was going to
be an art historian. I had done a lot of reading in the field, had attended lecture
courses of the Volkshochschule, had offered lectures of my own (with the aid of a
home-made projector) to family and friends, and had made my first trips to Italy.

To myself my choice of profession was obvious — there really was no
alternative — but in terms of either the material circumstances or the spirit of that time
it was not. The sensible people among my contemporaries studied law or medicine.
(In the case of those among them who subsequently became refugees the choice
proved unfortunate. Regardless of what country they went to they had to start all
over again; many had to give up altogether.) Art history was among the professions
generally called "brotlos." For a Jew the choice was particularly problematic, for in
pursuing an academic career — and this alone I was thinking of — he was at a
considerable disadvantage compared with his gentile competitor. We had a living

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example of this in my Uncle Fritz, a professor of penal law who had to wait for years
beyond what was normal for someone of his caliber before he was appointed to a
regular university chair. Yet I remember his saying to me, "If one has to one's credit a
solid performance one will succeed."

This was an obvious challenge. But there were intellectual — and indeed
moral — problems as well. We were in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis and
Germany was seething politically. My brother Richard, two years older than I, was
deeply engaged. He was not a communist (our Berlin cousins were) but he was then
a convinced materialist and was studying economics. ("Erst musst ihr Herrn uns was
zu fressen geben. . . " So ran a famous line in Brecht's Threepenny Opera.) I had to
defend my belief in the central importance of artistic creation in mankind's history
against Richard's radical rejection; and my conviction hardened in the process. But
another unsettling experience was a long and fierce discussion — probably during my
last year at school — with a friend of his who did not question the value and
importance of art but vehemently attacked the idea of pigeonholing and interpreting
works of art on historical lines rather than enjoying them individually, spontaneously,
and randomly.1

I entered Munich University in the summer term of 1 93 1 , having completed
nine years of a "humanistic" secondary education at the Max-Gymnasium with the
passing of the final exam (Abitur) that spring. It was customary for students in
Germany, particularly during their early years at university, to spend successive terms
at different places. In my case it was decided that I should, at any rate, start on home
ground. But I did, in keeping with custom, sit in on lectures in a variety of fields,
including classical archaeology, German and Romance literature, philosophy and even
physics (a course in which I thought I was acquiring at least a glimmer of
understanding of the theory of relativity). But the decisive intellectual experience of
that summer was attending the lectures of Wilhelm Pinder, the holder of the chair of
art history, and more particularly the exercises — a kind of pro-seminar — he held for
beginners. He would project side by side on the screen two paintings — say a
landscape by Rubens and one by Derain — and would analyze systematically the
characteristics which they had in common and those which distinguished them. Those
in the audience of about one hundred who were bold enough to volunteer would then
be helped to carry through a similar comparison. What Pinder fostered was
awareness of one's own visual perceptions, faith in the validity and importance of
those perceptions and the ability to articulate them, an ability which he possessed to
an extraordinary degree. For me it was that rare educational experience which does

1 This paragraph, along with the entire opening part of this memoir, was
written in July, 1986, a few weeks before Richard's sudden death on August 9.

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not consist in absorbing and digesting materials brought to one from outside, but in
having awakened within oneself something that had been there all along but had been
dormant. It was the proverbial scales falling from one's eyes.

Pinder, of course, was not alone at the time in practicing and advocating a
visual approach to the art of the past and more particularly an approach that
concentrated on the essence of a given style (as distinct from the connoisseur's
interest in characteristic detail that can help in attributing a particular work to a
particular "hand"). The great father figure who embodied this approach was Heinrich
Wolfflin, the doyen of art-historical scholarship in the German-speaking world, who
had defined in classic formulations the distinction between Renaissance and Baroque
art and that between Early and High Renaissance art in Italy. I had read Wolfflin's
books. Indeed, on one occasion, while I was still at school, I was able to see and hear
him, a man of majestic presence. He had come to Munich, where he had held the
chair of art history in earlier years, to give a lecture on Klassische Kimst (what else?)
for a general audience in the university's great lecture hall, and I was very much
impressed. But it was through Pinder that I learnt to develop in myself an ability to
"see" and to articulate what I saw.

Pinder — as distinct from Wolfflin, who postulated an autonomous "history of
seeing" — was apt to trace correspondences between historical styles and cultural
phenomena in other spheres. This, too, could be highly stimulating. Or perhaps I
should rather say it was seductive, for in the long term this aspect of his teaching was
to prove problematic in more than one respect. Style was a clue to psychological
make-up, along with other clues: "In the age of Mannerism one sent one's enemy a
poisoned glove; in the age of Baroque one plunged a dagger into him." For an
impressionable youngster this was heady stuff.

In the summer of 193 1 I went to Rome for a long vacation. Family finances
were strained and it was felt that it made more sense to spend money on my seeing
works of art than on my shopping around, a term at a time, listening to professors at
different universities. So for the winter term 193 1-1932 I was to have returned to
Munich.

My previous travel in Italy had been confined to the northern part of the
country. Now I was to see the Sistine Chapel, Raphael's Stanze, and many other stars
in Wolfflin's firmament. I did gaze at these stars, of course, but the crucial experience
of that summer was of a different order and quite unexpected. It was Rome itself. I
remember a quiet evening hour on a deserted Piazza S. Pietro. Sitting on the steps of
the Obelisk and surrounded by Bernini's colonnades, I felt the idea of the Eternal City
assuming an overwhelming reality and entering my whole being with the power of a

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physical force. What actually had brought this about was the realization that the
Rome of Cicero and Virgil, to which I had been exposed at school, and Renaissance
Rome were not separate monolithic entities. A chain of many links, some very
conspicuous, others less so, connected them. No one had ever mentioned the Baths
of Caracalla or the Aurelian walls. Yet here they were, enormously big and
enormously impressive. No one had spoken of these strange Early Christian
sarcophagus reliefs in the Lateran Museum or of the mosaic of SS. Cosma e
Damiano. "Ibam forte Via Sacra" had been simply a language exercise, one of the
many that had served to drill into us Gymnasiasten the rules of Latin grammar and
metrics. No one had ever told me that one could actually walk on the Via Sacra, let
alone that, in doing so, one came to a church built many centuries after Horace's time,
which contained in its apse one of the great visions of the Christian heaven. The fact
that ancient Rome did not just cease to exist but underwent a dramatic process of
transformation was my great discovery that summer. It was a wholly private
discovery. I did not know that by this time a sizable scholarly crew was already at
work tackling the art and culture of the Spdtantike.

The letters I wrote home that summer must have been very eloquent. Before
my time in Rome was up my parents wrote to say that evidently I was getting a great
deal out of this stay and wouldn't I want to stay in Rome for the winter instead of
returning to Munich? The suggestion utterly threw me. Quite contrary, I am sure, to
what my parents had intended, it provoked within me a profound crisis. Until then,
my encounter with Rome had been in the nature of an intellectual and emotional
adventure. Now I had to decide whether I wanted to make of it a long term
commitment. On the most elementary level it meant further financial outlay on my
parents' part (even though my living arrangements in Rome were extremely modest).
More profoundly, it meant transforming what had been up to that point a grand but
rather misty vision into serious and solid day-to-day work. Was I prepared to do
this? Was the vision sufficiently sound to permit such a shift? Did I really want to
subject those passionate insights to sober analysis? Above all, could I trust myself to
carry out this exploration on my own? Could I dispense with the guidance a second-
semester student would normally have from lectures and seminars? The prospect was
daunting; and I had to resolve the dilemma alone, without a chance to discuss it with
anyone. In retrospect, the short time I had to reach a decision amounted to a highly
condensed maturing process that otherwise might have been spread over months or
years. Much more was involved than where I was going to be for the ensuing winter.
I was being brought down to earth and had to come to grips with the realities of
myself, the world I was going to live in, and the goals I was going to pursue. Also, in
retrospect, though no one could have known this at the time, it was my parents'
startling and highly unconventional suggestion and my decision to follow it which
made it possible for me to become an academic at all — despite the upheaval that was

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to take place less than two years later. The account which follows will make this
clear.

It was decided — and this decision proved to be important later — that merely
for the sake of maintaining continuity in my scholastic record I should matriculate for
the winter semester at the University of Rome (actually, in local terms, it meant
enrolling for the whole academic year 193 1-32). I was not going to spend much time
in classrooms, though I did occasionally attend the lectures of Pietro Toesca, Carlo
Cecchelli, and Arduino Colasanti. The libraries of the German Archaeological
Institute and the Bibliotheca Hertziana became my bases. I divided my time between
visiting monuments and museums and reading up on what I had seen or was going to
see. In the former activity I tried to be both fairly systematic and fairly catholic. It
was the whole of Rome I wanted to become familiar with. In my reading I
concentrated a good deal on the art of imperial Rome and discovered that more than a
generation before my time Franz Wickhoff and, above all, Alois Riegl had dealt in a
fundamental way with the artistic phenomena that had begun to agitate me so
profoundly. I also delved into the literature on Early Christian art and began to be
troubled by the fact that much of that literature dealt with its subject in ways that
seemed irrelevant from an art historian's point of view. I shall leap a little bit ahead
here and refer briefly to the reports I wrote for a monthly called Die christliche
Kunst, as well as for daily papers in Munich and Augsburg, on the International
Congress of Christian Archaeology held in Ravenna the following autumn (1932). It
was the first congress I attended and my accounts of it were the first "professional"
writings of mine to appear in print. I boldly proclaimed that Christian archaeology
should stop pretending that it was a separate discipline. In part it should simply serve
as a handmaiden to theologians and historians, but in the main it should merge with
art history and treat its material art historically.

Both the German Archaeological Institute and the Hertziana offered lectures
and guided tours that were open to a wider public. (That public included a good
many ladies of mature age who were spending an agreeable winter in Rome and were
after culture. My own position was a little ambiguous. I did not fit into that
category, but neither was I a full-fledged scholar. Yet an accredited scholar was what
people generally assumed I was. I once expressed to a friend at the Hertziana
discomfort at being so often addressed as "Herr Doktor." His reply was: "In Rome
you are either a doctor or a countess") The outstanding figure at the Archaeological
Institute was Ludwig Curtius, its director, a true humanist in the nineteenth-century
tradition, to whom classical antiquity was a living (and somewhat romanticized) ideal,
and a brilliant speaker and writer. His book on Pompeian painting, published a few
years before, was one of my guiding lights that winter. There could be no greater
contrast than that between him and the second director, Armin von Gerkan, a
specialist on Roman architecture who conducted tours on the Forum and other

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ancient sites and discoursed on such prosaic matters as the sizes of bricks, the
presence or absence of bonding in walls and vaults, and the chronological implications
of all this. I remember an occasion when our venue was the Pantheon and we were
all sent home because that day, for some reason, von Gerkan could not get us access
to the hidden spaces of the building. The great interior, which was freely accessible,
was not a subject he was interested in talking about. Almost against my will I found
myself greatly intrigued by his demonstrations. One came away feeling that one had
become familiar in a very fundamental way with the monuments concerned and that
this approach was an essential prerequisite to their study in terms of art history.

I encountered this archaeological approach also at the Hertziana, where I was
befriended by the two holders of long term postdoctoral fellowships, Harald Keller
and Werner Korte. The latter was engaged in a study of the dome of St. Peter's
involving much sober research on documentary records and the extant wooden
models. Some time that winter I also had my first encounter with Richard
Krautheimer. (Actually, "first" is not quite accurate; we are distantly related and he
had been to our house when I was a child; but the encounter in Rome with him and
Trude was the beginning of a life-long friendship.) Richard was then at an early stage
of the work on his great corpus of Christian basilicas in Rome and the Hertziana was
his base there. Sizes of bricks and the bonding of walls were matters of much concern
also to him.

As a reader at the Hertziana one caught glimpses of numerous German art
historians who were passing through, or spending time in Rome, including some of
the greats in the profession. I remember seeing Arthur Haseloff and Adolph
Goldschmidt there. Maybe I was even introduced to them. Early in the spring Pinder
arrived and Keller and Korte saw to it that I met him. In fact, they arranged for me to
be detailed to look after him on my own one evening after dinner. It was for me a
momentous occasion — sitting with the Geheimrat in a modest little osteria not far
from the Hertziana and drinking local red wine. I explained my situation, how I had
"deserted" his courses for the semester in order to get to know Rome. "Oh yes," he
said, "you decided to spend time with those other originals." Pinder had not been in
Rome for many years and it was not clear to me what prompted him to go there at
that particular time (his own work was then concerned with German baroque
sculpture). In any case, he, too, found himself deeply and unexpectedly affected by
the monuments of the Spatantike; and in an evident departure from current pursuits,
he made the architecture of the period the subject of a lecture course in one of the
following terms. In a time of acute crisis, which is what the early 1930s were in
Germany, the crisis of Late Antiquity was apt to touch a raw nerve.

I met Pinder a second time during his stay in Rome when I was invited to join
a small group for which the Hertziana had managed to arrange a visit to the Palazzo
Rondanini. To be able to see Michelangelo's late Pieta, which was then still housed

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there, was a rare privilege. And for me the visit had an important sequel.

* * *

As had been planned, I returned to Munich in April for the summer term.
Technically I had been away for only one semester. My purpose now was to stop
being an autodidact, to learn through course work as much as possible about different
periods of art history and to get in the process as full and as varied a methodological
training as possible. Normally, however, a third semester student could not expect to
be admitted to Pinder's advanced seminar. Having become known to him personally,
I was admitted. The subject of the seminar was Michelangelo and the topic assigned
to me, together with another student, was the Pieta Rondanini. This being almost the
last of Michelangelo's works, our report was scheduled for the last meeting of the
seminar. I spent most of the term investigating the work itself, pondering the formal
problem inherent in the Pieta theme, and exploring the phenomenon of Mannerism.
At the time that concept was still fairly new in art history and it was beclouded by
varying, indeed conflicting definitions, some of which seemed to me to have a bearing
on a proper understanding of Michelangelo's sculpture.

As a schooling in advanced scholarship Pinder's seminar was a bit
disappointing. There was little criticism of one's performance. Essentially Pinder
was, in Anglo-Saxon terms, an undergraduate teacher, albeit an excellent one. So far
as methodologies are concerned, I profited more from some of the other courses I
took that summer and the following winter. Ernst Michalski's course on Giorgione
was a fine exercise in connoisseurship, threading, as it did, a tenuous path through a
thicket of attributions of varying plausibility. Carl Weickert taught one to analyze
methodically Greek sculptures and Roman portraits. (Decades later, when I myself
began teaching, I attributed to an Attic workshop an archaic stele that was generally
agreed to be South Italian.) Classical archaeology was an obligatory second subject
for anyone aspiring to a Ph.D. in art history. Ernst Buschor, the holder of the chair in
archaeology, would not admit art historians to his seminar, but his lectures were
memorable. His whole purpose was to let the object speak. His manner (by contrast
to Pinder's volubility) was restrained, not to say laconic. During the hour he would
go through his material twice: First, with the lights on, he would set out the facts at
little more than dictation speed, for us to take notes. Then when the slides came on
he would stand in darkness by the projector at the back of the room to look at them
with us and to let them inspire him as well as us.

All in all, the education an art historian got in Munich was decidedly one-
sided. In my critique of the Ravenna congress that autumn, which I mentioned
earlier, I vigorously advocated the study of Early Christian art qua art. But I became
increasingly and uncomfortably aware that something was missing in my study of art

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history. Those momentous processes at and after the end of antiquity which I was so
passionately determined to understand did, after all, involve other areas — history in
general, religion, philosophy. I was not acquiring the tools with which to fashion
links with these areas. I decided to go to Hamburg for a semester to study with
Erwin Panofsky.

Panofsky was not Pinder's favorite art historian. Occasionally in his lectures
Pinder would make polemical remarks about him, though I do not think at that stage
there were as yet racial overtones to these sallies, as there were to be later. ("One
cannot perceive what really sets apart the sculptures of Bamberg from those of Reims
if one does not have it in one's blood," I remember him saying in a later lecture on
German and French thirteenth-century art apropos of something Panofsky had
written.) I was a bit apprehensive when, in a brief office visit near the end of the
winter term, I told Pinder that I was planning to spend the following term studying
with Panofsky in Hamburg. But my uneasiness had nothing to do with politics even
though by that time Hitler had become chancellor of Germany. Pinder showed no
signs of irritation at hearing of my plan, but said he thought in the end I would
probably return to him.

I never got to Hamburg. I got as far as Berlin, where I went with the idea of
spending the spring vacation "doing" the museums while staying with our relatives.
The first stage of the Nazi revolution, which included the boycott of Jewish shops on
April 1, took place while I was there. (Actually, it had begun with the burning of the
Reichstag at the end of February.) I do not remember at what point I learnt that
Panofsky would no longer be teaching. In any case, even without this news I knew I
would have to return to Munich. It was only a question of time before Jews would no
longer be able to get a degree, or even matriculate, at a German university. To
complete a course of study abroad would not be possible financially. If I wanted to
be an art historian I had to get a Ph.D. as quickly as possible and this could only be
done in Munich.

I think back to the summer term of 1933 at Munich University as one of the
most unpleasant experiences of my life. I had not formed many personal friendships
among my fellow students, but we had a community of sorts. Now, one familiar
figure after another turned up in a new guise, wearing an SS or SA uniform. Every
day one wondered who would be next. One of the art history professors, his lapel
newly adorned with the Nazi Party pin, confided to his friends that he had been
wearing the pin under his lapel for more than a year.

Of course we "Non- Aryans" had one great advantage. We had no choice. I
was very conscious of this and often asked myself: What would I do now if I were in
the position of those others? I remember a conversation with one fellow student in
which the point came up. Prince Ludwig of Hesse, a scion of one of Germany's
former ruling houses, had been a student of Pinder's for some time. He clearly was

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above it all and continued to associate freely and openly with Jews. I expressed my
nagging thought to him by saying I felt sure that if it were not for the Nazi's anti-
Semitic stance, many a Jew would join them. "Yes," he said, "but I still wouldn't."
(Three or four years later he turned up as an attache at the German embassy in
London under Ribbentrop. As a descendant of Queen Victoria, and with an English
high society wife, he was quite a catch for the Nazis promoting appeasement in
England. I never saw him again but sometimes wondered whether he remembered
our conversation of 1933 and, if so, whether what I had said, unwisely, on that
occasion had helped him to ease his conscience.)

Pinder was swept up easily in the revolutionary wave. After the First War,
"Europe" had been on his mind, but at heart he was an ardent nationalist.
Intellectually and emotionally he was prepared to accept the essence of the Nazi
ideology. Nearly all his work had been concerned with German art; and increasingly
he had studied it — and German culture in general — with a view to finding in it
constant and unalterable traits, manifestations of a German soul, an eternal German
spirit rooted in the German soil. He would show on the screen one of those
complicated zoomorphic ornaments fashioned by Germanic tribes in the Migration
Period and compare to it a Bach fugue. His enchantment with the Nazis did not last
very long. He fell out with them when they started their attack on "Degenerate Art"
and subsumed under that label much modern work that was for Pinder a true
manifestation of the German soul. But in the summer of 1933 he was swept off his
feet. I remember him once in a lecture referring — I cannot think in what context — to
Hitler's use of the German language: "This man with his inexplicably pure German,"
he said. There was an element of surprise in this remark and also an element of
condescension — both, I'm sure, quite unconscious. The remark stuck in my mind
partly because it was so uncalled-for and partly because it was so wrong. Hitler's
accent and mode of speech were the typical ones of a lower class South Bavarian who
had suppressed the local dialect in order to blend into the middle class. It was the
hallmark of Halbbi Idling — semi-education.

Parenthetically I want to record here the occasion when I saw Hitler in person
and indeed from close-by. It happened either during that summer or the following
summer. My mother and I had been out for the evening to see a movie in the center
of town. We were waiting at the Odeonsplatz for a streetcar to take us back home
when we saw several big black cars go by at great speed and then come to a sudden
stop a little further on. We thought right away that this must be Hitler and his retinue.
Although his residence as chancellor was in Berlin, he still spent much time in
Munich, and the place where the cars stopped, at the edge of the Hofgarten, was a
coffeehouse (I think the name was Heck) which was known to be one of his favorite
haunts. On the spur of the moment we decided we, too, would have a cup of coffee
there. The locale was somewhat corridor-like with a central aisle and a single row of

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tables on either side. It was not crowded and the party we were looking for was at
the far end. A waiter stopped us when we tried to sit down at the table nearest to
them. That table had to be left empty. But even where we were allowed to sit we
were still quite close. There he was, surrounded by some of his cronies, none of
whom we recognized. The bodyguard sat at the table across the aisle. Mother was
struck by the dainty way he held his cup. To me the surprise was how unimpressive
he looked. The person one saw was rather slight, with a sallow complexion. Even
the famous diagonal sweep of hair was not as dramatic as it looked in the photograph.
But my main reaction was a rising rage. Why should this little man have the power to
wreck a lot of people's lives, including possibly mine? My temper was rapidly rising
to a boil and I was afraid of losing control. What if I suddenly screamed? I suggested
to mother that we drink our coffee quickly, pay our check, and leave. We did.

After the summer term had got underway I asked for an appointment with
Pinder. I told him that my only choice was between giving up now or trying to get a
Ph.D. in the shortest possible time; that I knew the minimum number of semesters
officially required by the university for granting a degree was six; that he normally
expected his doctoral candidates to have completed at least ten; and that at this point

I had only four. Would he let me try to finish with the officially permissible six, which
would mean starting work on a dissertation immediately? His answer, a memorable
one to me, amounting to a word of honor was: "I shall not put any obstacle in your
way." He also agreed to my taking as a subject for a thesis early medieval painting in
Rome — a field in which I felt I had enough of a head start to be able to at least try to
reach my goal within the proposed time limit. [My plan required me to] return to
Rome as soon as possible and stay there for the winter semester, a welcome prospect
in view of what I was currently experiencing in Munich.

Of course, transferring oneself to Rome was not escaping from the Nazi
problem altogether. Compared with the winter two years earlier, major adjustments
had to be made. The German institutes were no longer a home base. The Hertziana
was being transformed into an agency propagating German culture. At the German
Archaeological Institute Curtius tried valiantly to maintain its venerable scholarly
tradition intact. But for that very reason one felt one should confine contact to a
minimum so as to save him embarrassment and complications. My library research
was done partly at the Vatican and partly at the Instituto Nazionale di Archeologia e
Storia dell' Arte which was housed in the Palazzo Venezia, one floor below
Mussolini's office and his famous balcony. In the perspective of the post-World War

II era, it seems incredible that one should have been able to enter that building
routinely by the main portal day after day to do one's reading and studying. My only
problem was that my means of transportation was a bicycle (it saved bus and streetcar
fares) and at that time in Italy bicycles were used only by errand boys. I still
remember the helpless look on the face of the guard at the portal of the Palazzo when

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I presented myself with this unsuitable vehicle . . . "Se fosse un'automobile . . . ," he
said wistfully. (The problem was solved by my making an arrangement with the lady
who sold newspapers at the corner of the Corso; she let me park the bike outside her
little kiosk.)

Contacts with Germans who had become personal friends during my earlier
stay continued, though with greater or lesser amounts of strain. One evening that
autumn I found myself walking for hours back and forth between the Trinita dei
Monti and the Pincio Terrace with Werner Korte, who was still at the Hertziana and
was trying to explain to me why a radical change had had to take place in Germany.
It was "der Geist des Zauberbergs" — the mentality embodied in Thomas Mann's
novel published in the 1920s and to me a classic — which had to be overcome. (Korte,
who was a first-rate scholar and never did anything by halves, eventually was killed in
the mountains of Yugoslavia in a last ditch fight against partisans after the Germans
had officially surrendered.) Harald Keller's views were much less clearly defined and
subject to a variety of emotions that pulled him in different directions. But a firm
sheet anchor was provided for him by Gerda, his eminently sensible and level-headed
wife, who had found her spiritual home in the Bekenntniskirche, the part of the
German Protestant church that was opposed to Nazism.

Getting down to writing a doctoral dissertation meant a further confrontation
with hard reality, not dissimilar to, if less intense, than the one I had experienced two
years earlier when I decided to stay in Rome for that winter rather than return to
regular university studies in Munich. I knew from that previous encounter with the
monuments that there were dramatic and often puzzling changes and divergencies in
the stylistic make-up of the mosaics and wall paintings produced in Rome between the
sixth and the ninth century. Now it was up to me to make sense of this welter of
formal concepts, to define them in the first place, to trace a pattern of development
and to underpin this pattern as firmly as possible with concrete material data. Would
I be able to do this? Would I succeed in discerning within this fragmentary and
poorly preserved legacy of mural decorations the kind of order that I had seen Pinder
establish for late medieval sculpture in Germany? That a variety of different
Kunstwollen (Riegl's term) had been at work in Rome during those "dark" centuries
was self-evident. My eyes told me this and my faith in what they told me was
absolute. Now it was a question of methodical and detailed scrutiny of each
monument so as to turn general perceptions into solid scholarship.

I remember Harald Keller going with me one day that winter to the ruined
church of S. Maria Antique on the Forum — the richest treasure house of early
medieval wall paintings in Rome and principal locus of my research — and pressing me
hard for material evidence to support what I tried to tell him about stylistic
developments. I also remember an "audience" with Pietro Toesca (presumably
requested by me as a favor, as I was no longer a student at La Sapienza) at which he

325

quietly but firmly dismissed my exposition of these developments as "filosofia
tedesca." These were salutary encounters. They brought me down to earth and made
me concentrate more intently than I might have done otherwise on such matters as the
physical relationship between layers of painting, the shape of letters in inscriptions,
the information provided by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquarians, and so
on. I owe Rome as much for instilling in me respect for concrete material data of this
kind as for inspiring me with broad historical visions. But in the long run this
sobering effect perhaps was not without its negative side. Throughout my life as a
research scholar I have been apt to be overly conscientious in regard to what clearly
were in some instances secondary matters. I have tended to cling to the material
object too closely and to spend an undue amount of time on what can only be
described as niggling, with nothing to show for it in the end. I have been happier with
monographic and very detailed studies of single monuments under a given heading.
To be sure, I have also produced broad syntheses. What has always rather eluded me
is the middle ground where analysis and synthesis are in balance.

By the time I returned to Munich in the spring of 1934 I had with me a fairly
voluminous manuscript dealing with all extant mosaics and paintings in Rome that
were known to date from (or, according to me, should be attributed to) the period
from ca. 600 to ca. 750 A. D. I had organized the material on chronological lines,
distinguishing a succession of phases each of which was characterized by its own
dominant stylistic trend. But there was a cutting edge to the discussion as a whole.
Some eight years before, a detailed art-historical investigation of the murals of S.
Maria Antiqua had been published by Myrtilla Avery, a disciple of Charles Rufus
Morey in Princeton. I found myself in sharp disagreement with her findings— indeed
with her whole method and approach — and my thesis thus acquired a polemical tone.
More was at stake here than an individual aberration. In the 1920s and 1930s the
Princeton School (which was extremely prolific) dominated the scene internationally,
so far as research in Early Christian, Byzantine and early medieval art was concerned.
The Princeton Index of Christian Art, which Morey had founded, encouraged
somewhat mechanical statistical studies of iconographic detail — "Early Christian
Science" was what malicious tongues called the work carried out on its basis at that
time — and Miss Avery's study of S. Maria Antiqua was a typical product of the
Morey assembly line. My sympathies lay with Max Dvorak, the brilliant Viennese art
historian, who in a brief essay on Roman painting of the period in question — an essay
published before the First World War and ignored by Miss Avery — had set the
accents exactly right.

Being concerned exclusively with matters of form and style, my treatment was
decidedly one-sided. I was acutely conscious of this. I had traced a pattern of
development, but I knew I had not been able to identify the factors that powered this
development. There was little or no linkage between the picture I had drawn and the

326

general historian's picture of the period. Going through the relevant portions of
Gregorovius's History of Rome in the Middle Ages was no help. Reading him and
other historians one passed in review the same time spans, the same papal reigns that
had produced those paintings and mosaics. But such readings could not throw any
light on why, over the generations, there was so much change in their artistic form.
One possible clue, I knew, lay in the images' iconographic content. I had deliberately
excluded this aspect from the dissertation and was hoping to devote to it a separate
study later. Partly it would be a question of beating the Princetonians at their own
game. But there might also be clues as to the true causes of stylistic change. (Two
years later, in England, Hugo Buchthal and I spent a good deal of time on what was
planned as a joint study, on iconographic lines, of the Roman paintings and mosaics
and their Byzantine sources and affinities; we never finished it.)

My main task during the ensuing months — indeed my all-consuming
occupation during that summer and early autumn, aside from getting the dissertation
into prescribed shape and submitting it — was to prepare for the oral exams. A
candidate for the Dr. phil. had to pass oral exams in two secondary fields in addition
to his primary one. I was not worrying in regard to the latter. Pinder was known
generally to confine his questioning to the subject of the thesis. Of course, he need
not have done so. He could have made the exam as difficult as he pleased (or, for
that matter, could have rejected the thesis as submitted). So far as art history was
concerned, I relied on Pinder's promise of the previous summer. My main worry was
classical archaeology, an obligatory minor field for an art historian. Buschor was
known, among art historians particularly, as a tough examiner. One was either taken
to the gallery of plaster casts, located next to the Archaeological Seminar in the
Hofgarten, and questioned on a variety of ancient sculptures; or else one was
confronted with a pile of photographs and asked to identify the objects concerned,
give their dates, etc. Much of my time that summer was spent going systematically
through the notes I had taken in Buschor's lectures and through box after box of
photographs in the Seminar study room.

My second minor was philosophy and this, too, was a problem. I had been
much impressed by the teaching and personality of Richard Honigswald, a Neo-
Kantian who held the regular chair in philosophy. He, however, was Jewish and had
been suspended. His place had been taken by a professed Nazi whose name I do not
remember and who was known as something of a mystic. The only solution for me
was to ask to be examined by the holder of the second chair in philosophy which
existed at Munich University thanks to Bavaria's strong Catholic tradition. That
chair, wedded to the church, was held by a man called Geyser, an expert on
Scholasticism whose lectures I had never attended. Whatever time I could spare from
my studies at the Archaeological Seminar was devoted to reading up on Thomas
Aquinas.

327

The hour-long session with Pinder passed easily and pleasantly. I doubt that
he had delved very deeply into my thesis — those early paintings in Rome held no
particular interest for him — but we must have talked generally about things Roman
and early medieval. At one point, almost apologetically, he did put a question to me.
It had to do with those magnificent cycles of miniatures produced by the Reichenau
scriptorium during the Ottonian period. They are among the supreme achievements
of German art and their extraordinary, sometimes violent, expressiveness had a
particular appeal to a generation that had witnessed in its own art the rise of
Expressionism. Pinder's affection for these paintings thus was deeply rooted in his
personal history, but in the political atmosphere of the 1930s it assumed a special
topicality and a new intensity. His passions for the art of the Reichenau and for the
new Germany were mutually reinforcing. The question he asked me clearly caused
him some embarrassment, partly because he did not want to give the impression of
actually testing me, but mainly because he was afraid of hurting my Jewish
sensibilities. However, it was something that genuinely bothered him and so he asked
it anyway: Wasn't it sometimes thought, he said, that talking with one's hands was a
Semitic trait? Yet here were these figures in the most German of German artistic
creations, all gesturing violently with their hands. How was this to be explained?
What I said by way of offering a solution to this apparent conundrum does not much
matter. (I suggested that one should look at the illustrations in certain biblical
manuscripts produced in the Eastern Mediterranean region in much earlier centuries in
which this characteristic appeared; Reichenau artists may well have known such
miniatures and used them as models.) It is the question, and the circumstances in
which the question was raised, that are worth recording. Things had come to a pretty
pass in German academe for a doctoral candidate to be given this — and only
this — problem to tackle in his exam.

Buschor's, by contrast, was a real exam. There I sat, facing him and his stack
of miscellaneous photographs which he presented to me one by one. Having done so
much cramming I had no difficulty with any of them. After about ten minutes he
abruptly terminated the proceedings, saying they were a farce. There was an
interesting sequel to this session. Buschor was in the habit of taking his advanced
students to a beer garden once a week or so for an informal get-together. It so
happened that such a gathering took place in the evening following my exam. Among
the students who were present was one with whom I was still in contact. He told me
the next day that as the conversation had turned (inevitably) to the current political
scene, Buschor, who at the time was certainly sympathetic to the regime, had
mentioned that an exam he had conducted that day had given him food for thought.
The candidate had done very well indeed but had no future in Germany and was about
to leave the country. "Sometimes one wonders . . . ," Buschor mused. (Some fifty
years later, at a meeting of the Order Pour le Merite, I told this story to Elias Canetti,

328

who, of all people, had married Buschor's daughter. The glimpse it provided of his
late father-in-law's mind and thought in a distant past was of much interest to him.)

Trouble, deep trouble, arose quite unexpectedly in the philosophy exam.
Professor Geyser, of course, had never set eyes on me. I was immediately thrown off
balance when he informed me that he wanted me to talk about Hobbes. Never mind
all the reading I had done on the Scholastics. Hastily turning off that tap, I tried
instead to recollect bits from Honigswald's lectures on the antecedents of Kantian
epistemology in which thinkers like Locke, Berkeley and Hobbes had figured. No,
said the Professor, that was not what he wanted to hear. He wanted me to talk about
Hobbes's concept of the soul ("der Begriff der Seele bei Hobbes"). What made him
choose this topic I never knew. Was he trying to meet me halfway by going into a
field closer to Honigswald's than to his own? Or was his field too sacrosanct to allow
a non-believer — even one interested in the Middle Ages — to trespass on it? Anyway,
this was the subject and it was one about which I knew nothing. I tried to do what
students always do in such situations — make guesses, gently shift the ground.
Nothing worked. For a whole hour — and an hour was the length of time prescribed
for these exams — I was obliged to pursue this fruitless and desperate game of blind
man's buff. Minute by minute I saw all my hope for a future as a scholar drain away.
I was obviously failing this exam; and failing one exam was failing altogether. To stay
on in Munich and repeat the whole procedure at some future date was unthinkable.
All of a sudden an abyss had opened before me.

I have never forgiven this man the ordeal he put me through. In my mind he
remains an ogre to this day. Obviously, what any sensible examiner would have done
in such a situation was to chalk up a minus point against the candidate and go on to
another question. Why this particular Herr Professor was unable or unwilling to do
this was beyond me at the time and still is. However, all ended well. A day or so
later, after the obligatory meeting between the three examiners, Pinder informed me
that I had passed. When I expressed surprise at having passed the philosophy exam
he said that Kollege Buschor and he had reasoned with Kollege Geyser and had
pointed out to him that philosophical expertise was not essential to the scholarly work
I was hoping to pursue.

Not only had I passed, but I was awarded a degree summa cum laude. It was
a fairly rare distinction and I doubt that in normal circumstances a candidate who had
in effect failed in one of his subjects would have received it. Pinder (with Buschor's
help) must have wangled it, thinking it might be some help to me in a totally uncertain
future. It was the first of a number of occasions in my life as a scholar when I felt I
was gaining an unmerited advantage from being a "victim of Nazi oppression" (to use
what later became a standard phrase in official English pronouncements relating to
central European refugees). Yes, one was being excluded a priori from many a
competition. But when one did receive a preferment one could not necessarily take it

329

at face value.

Upon learning that I had passed the exams I left Germany immediately — the
next day, in fact. There was talk at the time of men of military age not being allowed
to go abroad and I was afraid of being stopped at the frontier. The fact that one was
a pariah did not mean that one was exempt from the army's grasp. My departure,
though in effect a planned emigration, thus became something of a flight. My
destination was Rome. It was the only place abroad with which I was familiar: I was
under no illusion as to any long term prospects there. No foreigner could aspire to an
academic career in Italy. But I thought I might eke out a living for awhile with odd
jobs.

Actually, I was not totally penniless. My father had made an application to
the financial authorities in Munich for me to be allowed to take abroad some
funds — about £250, 1 think — that had originally come from abroad, being part of his
inheritance from his brother Berthold, who had died a wealthy man in England some
years before. An appointment had been obtained with an official at the office
concerned. Of course, one never knew on such occasions what sort of an individual
one was going to face: a rabid Nazi? a time-serving bureaucrat? maybe even
someone who was secretly sympathetic? All I remember from this interview, which at
the time seemed inconclusive, is one sentence. After I had explained my situation to
the official my father followed up by saying: "Man kann doch sein Kind nicht ins
Elend stossen" — Surely, one can't push one's child into misery. It was an
extraordinary thing for him to say. He was the quietest, calmest, least demonstrative
of persons, and melodrama was not normally his line. Whether the official sensed this
I do not know. The person he saw before him clearly was not a "Kind" but a grown-
up man almost twenty-two years old with a nearly completed Ph.D. In any case,
eventually the application was granted.

In Rome that winter I managed to earn small amounts of money giving
German lessons. I also tried, unsuccessfully, to become a tourist guide. That
occupation was organized as a closed shop. Any intruder could be spotted readily.
My social and professional contacts were now largely confined to fellow refugees,
academics like myself, in more or less precarious circumstances, except that most of
them were older and had held positions in German universities. With the exception of
a very few Catholics who obtained jobs at the Vatican, no one could think of Italy as
a long term haven. In retrospect this seems self-evident, seeing what was to happen
to Italy's own Jewish population later in the decade. But in 1934 being Jewish was
not an issue. It was only after his attack on Abyssinia had turned the western
democracies against him that Mussolini effected his rapprochement with Hitler which
eventually led him to embrace the Nazi's racial policy. In 1934 it was the fascist party
line to ridicule the idea of an Aryan master race. "Non una ma cinque" was the title
of an editorial that appeared in the Messagero, Rome's leading daily paper, that

330

winter. It pointed out the variety of races that made up the people of modern
Germany.

One task to which I needed to attend quite urgently was to make my
dissertation ready for printing. For only after delivering to the university so many
printed copies (two hundred I think) could one receive one's diploma. Regulations
called for the thesis to be printed exactly as it had been approved by the professor in
charge. But at the time this rule was no longer enforced. Because of the economic
straits in which most students found themselves, abridged versions were generally
accepted. Printing at one's own expense, however, was a pis aller, in any case. Every
aspiring scholar tried to have his thesis taken on by a publisher, or, if the format
permitted, have it appear in a journal. But by the time my thesis was ready, no work
by a Jewish author could be published in Germany. For a while it looked as though
there were a solution in Rome. I was on friendly terms with Johannes Kollwitz, who
later became Professor of Christian Archaeology in Freiburg and at the time
represented that field at the German Archaeological Institute. Kollwitz was a priest
and thus somewhat independent. He had close links with the Camposanto Teutonico,
the venerable German ecclesiastical establishment adjacent to St. Peter's which had
long been the publisher, or co-publisher, of the Romische Quartalschrift fur
christliche Altertumskunde imd Kirchengeschichte (to give it its full title). In terms
of that journal's tradition my thesis had rather too much of an art-historical slant, but
Kollwitz thought it could be accepted if I managed to abridge it drastically.
Eventually the plan came to naught because the journal, although directed from
Rome, was printed in Germany. But meanwhile I had started to cut my text and in
due course I had a radically reduced version printed as cheaply as possible in Munich.

It became clear to me in the course of the winter that I could not and should
not prolong my stay in Italy. Professionally it was a dead end and intellectually I was
stagnating. I decided to try my luck in England. The idea had been implanted in me
by Hugo Buchthal, whom I had met in Rome during my previous stays and who at the
time had become a kind of mentor. He was three years older than I and had had far
more extensive and rigorous training, being a student of Panofsky's in Hamburg. He
had just managed to get his Ph.D. before Panofsky left Hamburg for good in the
summer of 1933. The subject of his thesis was one of the most famous Byzantine
illuminated manuscripts, a psalter of the tenth century in Paris. Investigating the
antecedents of its miniatures he faced very much the same problems that "my" Roman
paintings posed concerning Byzantine painting of an earlier period. Also, like myself,
he had to contend with the ideas and the methods of Morey and the Princeton School.
So we had much in common and I profited a great deal from his superior knowledge
and fully developed methodology , to say nothing of his innate pedagogical gift.

Buchthal had gone to England when the Warburg Library moved there from
Hamburg after the Nazi takeover in Germany. The Library had been loosely affiliated

331

with the University of Hamburg and had been the intellectual home of its art history
students who, under Panofsky's leadership, had been pursuing their work in a broad
context of cultural history. It was Fritz Saxl, the director, who with extraordinary
skill and determination had orchestrated the Library's move to London, where It
became the Warburg Institute. Buchthal had spoken often and warmly about Saxl and
the small circle of people around him. His advice was that I should go to London.
But I was under no illusions as to prospects there. A good many German art
historians had sought refuge in England, partly because it was the most practicable
way station for securing a position in America, the only country that might absorb our
species in larger numbers. I knew, however, that in any competitive situation I would
be at a disadvantage because of my youth and lack of professional credentials and
experience. At best, one could think of the Warburg Institute as a sort of provisional
anchorage. Contact with it might also provide some of that intellectual guidance I
had previously hoped to get in Hamburg. But unlike Buchthal, I had no special claim
on the Warburg circle's consideration either in intellectual or personal terms. My only
link with that circle was Buchthal himself.

England 1935-1941

I travelled from Rome to London in early May 1935, briefly stopping in Paris
on the way. Experiencing new places was always a thrill, but I was not at ease during
that stay. I was not a tourist and the immediate future was shrouded in mist.
Although In years to come I was to return to Paris many times and always enjoyed
the city, I never really got to feeling at home there as I did — and still do — in Rome.
Partly this is because of the language, which I never learnt to use comfortably (in the
1920s, following World War I, French was deliberately neglected in German — or at
any rate, Bavarian — schools). Also, my world was, and has remained, essentially bi-
polar— North versus South — and Paris has never quite fitted into it.

Getting into England one faced a potentially insurmountable hurdle. Germans
whom the immigration officer at the port of arrival suspected of being refugees
seeking extended residence — and possibly jobs — were often turned back. One was
wholly at the mercy of these officials. Britain refused to adopt a system of visas that
would do away with such acute uncertainty facing the traveler. (As I write this, in the
autumn of 1 992, this same problem has once again assumed dramatic form — for
refugees from Yugoslavia arriving at British ports and airports.) I had carefully
prepared my line: I was a scholar needing to do research in British libraries and
museums; did not know how long exactly this would take; and I had funds adequate
for my purpose. What I had not expected was that the immigration interview would
take place not at the port of arrival but on the Channel steamer during very rough
crossing. It was another of those critical moments when one's whole future was at

332

stake. All I remember is that I was nearly sick; that the official did stamp my
passport; and that at Folkestone ( or was it Newhaven?) I sank into an unexpectedly
comfortable seat in a railway carriage (in Germany and Italy third-class seats were not
upholstered) in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. When I looked at my
passport properly I found that it bore an entry stamp without the usual addition
limiting one's sojourn to six months. That first English train journey was like a blissful
dream.

I had relatives in London both on my father's and my mother's side. This fact
provided a vague sense of "home." One got invited for the occasional weekend by
Father's venerable aunt, Minna Dunkels, at her sumptuous country place in
Maidenhead (or for dinner at her equally sumptuous flat facing St. James Palace) and
for lunch or dinner by Uncle Ernst and Aunt Julia Wilmers, Mother's cousins, at the
Mount Royal Hotel in Oxford Street, where they lived. But the greatest help in
settling in was the presence of Harold (formerly Hannsheinz) Ballin, my closest
boyhood friend, who had been in London since 1933, and thanks to family
connections, had obtained a regular job at the G. E. C. He lived in a boarding house
ofTMaidavale and he got me a room there. Eventually he rented a flat on the east
side of Hampstead Heath to accommodate the whole Ballin family — his parents and
sister followed him into emigration — and I sub-rented one of the rooms. It was my
abode during the greater part of my London years.

At the Warburg Institute — then located somewhat incongruously in Thames
House, an office complex of the I. C. I. — Hugo Buchthal introduced me to Fritz Saxl
and Gertrud Bing, who did what they could to help refugee scholars with advice and
sympathy while being engaged in the arduous task of maintaining the intellectual
tradition they had brought from Hamburg and gaining a niche for it in the British
academic establishment.

One other professional contact I had in London — a somewhat tenuous
one — was Elizabeth Senior. She had been an art history student in Munich and was
now in the department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. I had not
known her well, but felt I could call on her for some possible advice. This re-
encounter proved to be a major turning point. Not only did Elizabeth become a very
good friend, but it was thanks to her friendship with T. D. Kendrick that I gained,
within a couple of weeks after my arrival, a toehold on the bottom rung of a ladder
that would ultimately lead to a career in my chosen sphere of work. Kendrick was an
assistant keeper in the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities of the British
Museum and had started on a systematic survey of all stone sculpture in England
extant from the Anglo-Saxon (i.e. pre-Norman) period. Elizabeth arranged for me to
meet him. At a — to me forever memorable — dinner at the Savile Club he invited me
to become a volunteer assistant for this project.

My ignorance of those sculptures was total. I had never even heard of the

333

crosses of Ruthwell and Newcastle, let alone of the multitude of other — more or less
fragmentary — remains, mostly in northern England (and in Ireland) of high crosses
richly carved with figures and ornaments in relief. A new dimension and a fascinating
one, was added to my panorama of the art of Dark Age Europe. The early crosses
were of roughly the same period as the wall paintings in Rome that had been the
subject of my thesis and they obviously had Mediterranean sources. Kendrick, of
course, was aware of the importance of these alien sources for the art of the crosses.
It was one of the reasons that prompted him to take me on as a helper in his project.
He thought that my recent and intense involvement with relevant monuments in Italy
and the Byzantine world would be of use. Also, on a more practical level, he needed
assistance in collecting and organizing his material. His regular museum duties did
not leave him enough time for this. But looking back to that encounter from a
distance of more than half a century, I think there was a third, more general reason for
his interest in me as well, perhaps one of which he himself was not fully conscious: I
was a living specimen of art-historical scholarship as then practiced on the Continent.

As an academic discipline the history of art was still a newcomer in England at
the time. The Courtauld Institute, which established teaching and research in the
subject within the University of London, had been in operation for only a few years.
Kendrick's own previous work had been mostly concerned with prehistoric
archaeology. His interests, however, were broad and extraordinarily varied.
Whether, or to what extent, it was Elizabeth Senior who, by communicating to him
something of her Munich experience, had awakened in him an interest in Continental
approaches to the art of the past I do not know. In any case, he clearly thought that
Anglo-Saxon art was a field where new insights were to be gained by using such
approaches. Viewed in the overall context of his life's work, this was but a phase. He
later shifted to entirely different subjects — the Lisbon earthquake and its effect on
eighteenth-century thought; the history of British antiquarianism — to say nothing of
his work as a novelist. But in the 1930s Anglo-Saxon art — viewed as art — was his
central concern. In two volumes, published in 1938 and 1940 respectively, he
encompassed its entire development. They probably are his most important and most
original work.

From the very outset Kendrick made it clear to me that I could not expect
ever to be taken on by the British Museum as a regular staff member. Museum
officials were (and still are) civil servants, and to be accepted into the civil service one
had to be British-born. (That rule was later changed, but by then I had left England.)
Kendrick thought, however, that having a British Museum "address" could be of
some help to me in my quest for a regular position. My best hope was to get a job in
America.

334

INDEX

Ackerman, James, 161
Adams, Walter, 78
Alexander, Margaret, 124
Alfoldi, Andreas, 180, 181
Alte Pinakothek, 4, 12
Anastos, Milton, 125, 155, 296,

307-308
Andreades, G.A., 171
Anicia, Juliana, 224-225
Arnheim, Rudolf, 103
Aubert, Marcel, 1 69
Avery, Myrtilla, 61-62, 64, 326

Ballin, Harold, 99, 333
Barral i Altet, Xavier, 251-252
Barthes, Roland, 287
Battiscombe, Christopher F., 93, 94
Beckwith, John, 196
Berenson, Bernard, 254
Bialostocki, Jan, 212
Bibliotheca Hertziana, 35, 36, 39-41,

48,49,319,324
Bing, Gertrud, 77, 333
Blake, Robert, 119
Blanckenhagen, Peter Heinrich von,

160
Bliss, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods,

114, 118, 119, 141, 145,209,289,

291-292, 294, 299, 301, 302, 303,

305
Bloch, Herbert, 282
Bok, Derek, 285, 302, 311
Borsook, Eve, 202-203
Boulding, Kenneth, 223
Brendel, Otto, 158

British Museum, 78-83, 86, 87-91,

95-96, 104-107, 108, 112, 131,

144, 158, 162-163,204
Bruce-Mitford, Rupert Lee Scott, 107
Buchthal, Hugo, 28, 38, 39, 41,

52-53, 62, 64, 66-67, 75, 97, 149,

228, 231, 234, 327, 331-332, 333
Buschor, Ernst, 29, 50, 55, 67, 70, 72,

160, 272, 321, 327, 328
Byzantine Art in the Making, 93, 160,

169, 219, 230-231, 237-244, 278,

312

Canetti, Elias, 328

Cappella Palatina, 92, 93, 94, 168,

171-183, 198-199, 202, 203, 233,

264, 267
Cassirer, Ernst, 30-3 1
Cecchelli, Carlo, 319
Cleveland marbles, 246-25 1
Colasanti, Arduino, 319
College Art Association, 220-221
Constable, Giles, 301, 302, 307, 308
Courtauld Institute, 78, 87, 91, 96,

299, 334
Croce, Benedetto, 21, 240
Crosby, Sumner McKnight, 157
Cross, Frank Moore, 280
Curtius, Ludwig, 42, 319
Cuthbert, Saint, 93-94, 166-168, 217

Darwin, Charles, 227-228

David, Percival, 83

Dehio, Georg, 18-19, 32, 315

Demus, Otto, 98, 136, 148, 198-201,

209, 232, 257, 262
Der Nersessian, Sirarpie, 300

335

Didron, Adolphe-Napoleon, 213

Diepolder, Hans, 68

Dilthey, Wilhelm, 44

Downey, Glanville, 155

Duke University, 130-131

Dumbarton Oaks, 117, 118, 127,
140-141, 148, 152, 159, 181-182,
185, 190, 202, 209, 251, 257, 266,
276, 297, 311; administration of,
145-146, 289-293, 299-305;
Archives Project, 120-123,
143-144, 293-294; beginnings,
114-1 15; focus on art, 119,
124-125, 305-309; Harvard, and,
142-143, 155-156, 275, 295-296;
Kitzinger's resignation from,
219-220, 302, 312; publications
program, 261-262, 264, 297-299,
309-310; role in war and peace,
131-132.

Diirer, Albrecht, 12, 19

Dvorak, Max, 44, 45, 46-47, 58, 62,
144, 226, 326

Dvornik, Francis, 307-308

Early Medieval Art in the British

Museum, 86, 87-88, 91, 93
Education (early), 14-18
Ehrenzweig, Anton, 103
Eliot, T.S., 95

Felix, Marcus Minucius, 184-185
Fioravanti, Aristotile, 206-207
Focillon, Henri, 38, 119, 157, 292
Fogg Art Museum, 1 14, 156, 279
Forbes, Edward Waldo, 114, 157
Forsdyke, E.J., 89,91,92
Forsyth, George H., 160
Forsyth, Ilene, 160
Frankl, Paul, 19-20

Frantz, Alison, 119
Freud, Sigmund, 100-101
Friend, Albert M., 96-97, 141,

146-150, 151, 152, 155, 161, 182,
184-187, 215, 226, 257, 295, 297,
300,301,307,308,311-312

Georg, Stefan, 99-100, 180-181
Gerkan, Armin von, 42, 319-320
German Archaeological Institute, 42,

70,73,298,319,324
Giorgione, 28-29
Gogh, Vincent van, 5
Goldschmidt, Adolph, 50, 151, 161,

320
Gombrich, EH, 97, 102, 188,

212-213, 227, 275
Grabar, Andre, 81, 179, 181, 185
Gravina, Domenico, 204, 208-209
Gregorovius, Ferdinand, 45, 326

Harvard Defense Group, 127

Harvard University, 72, 103, 114, 119,
126, 127, 140, 142, 143, 155-157,
161, 237-239, 244-245, 248,
254-255, , 272-273, 295-296

Haseloff, Arthur, 320

Haskell, Francis, 176-177

Hauttmann, Max, 2 1

Hawkes, C.F.C., 163

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 51,
91,227

Heidegger, Martin, 3 1

Heine, Heinrich, 1 7

Henry, Francoise, 170

Herrnstein, Richard J., 284

Herz, Alec, 113

Hill, George, 82

Hinks, Roger P., 88-89, 91, 95, 98,
163

336

Hobbes, Thomas, 71
Holt, Elizabeth, 72, 126
Honigswald, Richard, 30, 68, 71, 327,

329
Husserl, Edmund, 3 1

Ibsen, Henrik, 1 7
Index of Christian Art, 69
Inflation (Germany), 5-6
Institute for Advanced Study

(Princeton), 135, 152, 180, 220,

247, 276, 290
Institute of Fine Arts (NYU), 158,

159-160

Jaffe, Michael, 237
Janson, H.W., 226
Jenkins, Romilly, 307-308
Jung, Carl, 101-102

Kandinsky, Wassily, 23 1
Kant, Immanuel, 30, 71, 162
Kantorowicz, Ernst, 100, 180-182
Keller, Harald, 36, 39^0, 320, 325
Kendrick, T.D., 79-80, 81, 83, 86-87,

91,93,95,98, 104, 105, 162, 163,

333-334
Kinney, Dale, 243
Kitzinger, Adrian (son), 138
Kitzinger, Elisabeth Merzbacher

(mother), 1-2, 4, 9, 11, 13
Kitzinger, Fritz (paternal uncle), 19,

315-316
Kitzinger, Gretel (sister), 7, 8-9, 10,

20
Kitzinger, Margaret Susan Theobald

(wife), 98, 136-137, 138,313
Kitzinger, Rachel (daughter), 138
Kitzinger, Richard (brother), 7-8, 14,

20, 134,316

Kitzinger, Stephen Anthony (son),

138-139
Kitzinger, Wilhelm (father), 1, 2, 5-7,

10-11,330
Koehler, Wilhelm, 114, 119-122,

124-125, 141, 142, 143-146, 147,

152, 226, 275, 279, 292-295,

297-298, 306
Kollwitz, Johannes, 73, 331
Komstedt, R., 169-170
Korte, Werner, 39, 40, 55, 320, 325
Krauss, Rosalind, 245
Krautheimer, Richard, 49-50, 114,

160, 161, 183-184,320
Krautheimer-Hess, Trude, 114, 320
Kris, Ernst, 102-103
Kubler, George, 222-223, 225, 227
Kuhn, Thomas, 223
Kimstwollen, 36, 60, 173, 201, 221,

325
Kurz, Otto, 15, 38-39, 97-98

Ladner, Gerhart, 100
Laiou, Angeliki E., 308
La Piana, George, 145, 307
Lavagnini, Bruno, 260, 262
Lazarev, Victor, 172
Lee, Sherman, 246, 248
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 285
Liebermann, Max, 24

Male, Emile, 38
Mann, Thomas, 31-32
Maraini, Fosco, 258, 259
Maritain, Jacques, 95
Meiss, Millard, 276
Michalski, Ernst, 28, 57, 321
Micheli, Loulou, 170
Mommsen, Theodor, 45
Morelli, Giovanni, 29, 234

337

Morey, Charles Rufus, 61-62, 64-67,

85, 119, 122, 134, 151, 170, 191,

292,297, 326,331
Morgan, J. P., 249
Morike, Eduard, 1 7
Mosaics of Monreale, The, 159,

197-202, 204, 205-21 1, 220, 228,

232-233, 260
Mosaics of St. Mary's of the Admiral

in Palermo, The, 177-178,

261-262, 264
Murray, Charles, 284

Nazism, 2-3, 7, 9-10, 29, 34, 39, 40,
42,51, 54-57,68,73,74-75,
322-324, 325, 329-330

Novalis, 17

Office of Strategic Services (OSS),

126-130, 136, 137, 295
Olmsted, Frederick Law, 247
Opdyke, Leonard, 1 56

Panofsky, Erwin, 28, 31, 41, 45, 50,
51, 52, 53-54, 68, 95, 96, 149, 151,
152-153, 161-162,212,248,
321-322,331

Pevsner, Nikolaus, 57, 183-184, 196,
312

Philagathos, 174-175

Pinder, Wilhelm, 21-28, 29, 48-49,
50, 51, 55-57, 59, 68-70, 72, 74,
92, 150, 272, 316-317, 320, 321,
322, 323, 324, 327-328, 329

Pollock, Griselda, 239, 253, 287

Pollock, Jackson, 230, 244

Porter, Kingsley (Mrs), 275

Portraits of Christ, 131

Post, Chandler, 156, 161

Pusey, Nathan, 285, 302

Quine, W.V., 280

Rand, Edward Kennard, 306-307
Rice, David Talbot, 83
Riegl, Alois, 36, 37, 319
Riesman, David, 219
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 99-100
Robertson, Martin, 89
Rosenberg, Jakob, 156, 161
Ruskin, John, 254

Sachs, Paul, 114, 156, 157
Sackler, Arthur M, Museum, 279
Saxl, Fritz, 77,96, 331
Schapiro, Meyer, 158-159, 215, 217,

275
Schlosser, Julius von, 97, 100
Schmarsow, August, 22
Sedlmayr, Hans, 150, 170
Senior, Elizabeth, 78-79, 98, 131,

333,334
Simmel, Georg, 44
Simpson, Esther, 78
Simson, Otto von, 153-155
Slade Lectures, 161, 197, 237-239
Smyth, Craig Hugh, 160
Spengler, Oswald, 272
Steinmann, Ernst, 39
Strich, Fritz, 21
Strong, Eugenie, 37
Strzygowski, Josef, 66, 150, 170, 191

Tannhauser Gallery (Munich), 5
Thacher, John S, 141-142, 299-300,

302,303,310
Toesca, Pietro, 35, 60-61, 319, 325
Tonnochy, Alec Bain, 98-99
Toynbee, Arnold, 272
Tucci, Giuseppe, 258
Tyler, Royall, 301

338

Tyler, William R , 301, 302, 303

Underwood, Paul, 155, 299, 304

Van Nice, Robert L, 304
Vossler, Karl, 21

Warburg Institute (London), 39, 75,
76, 77, 88, 94-95, 96, 98, 102, 108,
112, 158,332,333

Weber, Alfred, 44

Weber, Max, 44

Weickert, Carl, 29, 30, 68, 321

Weimar Republic, 7, 227

Weitzmann, Kurt, 38, 53, 81, 149,
151-152, 161, 188-189, 190, 192,
199-200, 226, 228, 231-233, 249,
297

Whittemore, Thomas, 85, 86, 298-299

Wickhoff, Franz, 37, 319

Wind, Edgar, 95, 96, 108-109

Wittkower, Rudolf, 158

Wixom, William D., 248

Wolfflin, Heinrich, 4, 18, 20, 21, 22,
36,50-51, 154,317

World War II, 40, 78-79, 80,
105-108, 109-113, 115-118,
126-132, 134, 137, 140-141, 145,
158

Wormald, Francis, 162

Yale University, 157

339

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